| description | Jan-Wouter Zwart. 2011. Structure and order: asymmetric merge. In Cedric Boeckx, ed., The Oxford Handbook of linguistic minimalism, pp. 96-118. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
| type | Handbook chapter. |
| ID | 2011a | 139 | DOI | February 20, 2009; corrected January 4, 2010. |
| origin | Invited contribution to said handbook. My current thinking about structure-to-order conversion, which owes much to Richard Kayne's work. The idea of asymmetric merge goes back to 2003 (letter to Chomsky of December 9) and has been developing since then, mostly in talks and graduate school lectures. It gave rise to the project "Dependency in Universal Grammar", and was given further wings by Jordi Fortuny's dissertation. The stuff on deviations from automatically generated order is more recent, and published here for the first time. |
| keywords | merge; linear order; asymmetric merge; Linear Correspondence Axiom; OV/VO-order; layered derivations; lexicalism; recursion; bare phrase structure |
| summary | The paper discusses the possibility of automatic conversion from hierarchical structure to linear order, by assuming that merge is asymmetric (considered in both bottom-up and top-down derivations). The paper proposes a layered derivation architecture which requires elements constructed in separate derivations to pass through the interfaces before being included in the numeration of the next derivation. Linear orders deviating from the automatic structure-to- order conversion originate at the sound interface separating two derivation layers. |
| related |
full text Presentations: Leiden, 12/2008; Princeton, 02/2008; TIN, 02/2008; Harvard, 05/2007; ACTL, 03/2007; Barcelona, 01/2007; Tilburg, 10/2004; Ann Arbor, 07/2004 Publications: Prospects for top-down derivation Project proposal: DIUG, 07/2005. |
