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Late Merge as Lowering Movement in Minimalist Grammars

Graf, Thomas

Abstract Minimalist grammars can be specified in terms of their derivation tree languages and a mapping from derivations to derived trees, each of which is definable in monadic second-order logic (MSO). It has been shown that the linguistically motivated operation Late Merge can push either component past the threshold of MSO-definability. However, Late Merge as used in the syntactic literature can be elegantly recast in terms of Lowering movement within the framework of Movement-generalized Minimalist grammars. As the latter are MSO-definable, the linguistically relevant fragment of Late Merge is too.

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@Misc{Graf14LACLtalk,
  author    = {Graf, Thomas},
  title     = {{L}ate {M}erge as Lowering Movement in {M}inimalist Grammars},
  year      = {2014},
  note      = {Slides of a talk given at {LACL} 2014, June 18--20,
          {IRIT}, Toulouse, France}
}

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