Dan Everett: Word formation constraints (reply to Heidi Harley)

[Martha McGinnis]

Heidi's solution to my query, that it is primarily a syntactic problem,
may in fact be correct. However, this itself raises problems for the
syntax. I will just mention what I think the problem is. It is not
directly relevant for DM but it is indirectly relevant to the degree that
DM has an opinion about what syntactic theory its own apparatus follows.

Assume some version of the MP. Andrew Carnie's solution in Irish will work
in MP and DM and I think it is quite a reasonable one. However, it works
in the MP because the syntax can form a phrase and then MOVE it into the
appropriate and, this is crucial, preexisting (by Select) morphological
position (and it can do this only in the MP,among formal theories, because
other theories crucially distinguish bar-levels, certainly this is true of
LFG and, I believe, it is still true for HPSG). However, in the absence of
movement, the only way to embed a phrase into a morphological position is
via MERGE. But Merge has problems here. Merge can only take place if a
node is licensed for it (in the absence of base-generated trees, which are
eliminated in the MP). The V node, so far as I can tell, is not really
licensed by anything but the V itself (although I think some may have
proposed having the Tense-node license/select it and John Bowers has
argued for a Pr0 node - but that will still only work if the Pr0 node is
lexical, I think). So, if there is no V, there doesn't seem to be any way
to Merge a phrase into it (since the phrase is not in the Array and cannot
be chosen by Select). That means that if one could show a case which
needed to be analyzed as Merge into V (though I think, sigh, that it is
probably impossible to conclude that the MP 'needs' to analyze anything in
any particular way) that should be a problem for the MP and, thus, to DM
if MP is its 'feeder syntax module'.

But note that if one DOES have Merge into X0 categories (in spite of what
I think the likelihood of MP being able to do this) it also provides a
solution to the phrasal words/adjectives I brought up initially.

Anyway, I have no doubt but that Heidi's proposal is the way to go about
things wrt this type of phenomenon (which I believe to be fairly rich,
cross-linguistically). The question is to find the best theory to do this
in.

-- Dan