Dan Everett: Word formation constraints (reply to Alec Marantz cont'd)

[Martha McGinnis]

Folks,

One other thing about Alec's posting, since no one else tried to answer my
technical question. Contrary to Alec's suggestion, there is no confusion
about node labels, so far as I can see. I am quite able to understand the
MP reasoning behind the suggestion that nodes have no labels. Since there
is no base component and since nodes are not so labeled in the lexicon, ex
hypothesi, there is no way to have labeled nodes in the syntax, at least
until after Merge and the postsyntactic DM work. Na~o ha' problema.

On the other hand, I must admit that I *am* confused about node origins
when those nodes do not dominate anything. Take movement of a phrase into
the head of TP, for example. Why is the head/phrase there to serve as a
target for movement? Either a node is required for lexical reasons or it
is not there. What requires T? If the node is required by some aspect of
LF, then the relevant constraint is global (not unusual for MP, since, as
I pointed out in my Lg review of Hornstein's LF book sometime ago, MP has
all possible constraints: global and violable, global and inviolable,
local and violable and local and inviolable). But globality seems to be an
embarassment here. Surely GREED or something in that spirit is more
desirable, i.e. a local lexical requirement.

I am not claiming anything here about the plausibility or possibility of a
structuralist analysis of the facts. I am simply saying that I do not know
how MP (and hence, I believe ultimately DM) can have a node for a phrase
to move into unless that target node is first itself lexically required,
e.g. by a null item projecting it).

I don't think that the solution is going to be via MERGE, but perhaps
there is something along those lines I have missed.

If people think that this is a syntactic question, not a morphological
question, my response is "I thought DM said that morphological structure =
syntax".


-- Dan