Movement's just another word for nothing left to merge

[Tibor Kiss]

Hi,

some of you might surely be aware that Chomsky has recently proposed (i.a.
in 2005-LI) that move is in fact just a kind of merge, where you merge an
item that has already been merged. Now the copy theory of movement boils
down to the idea that only the highest c-commanding phrase is not deleted
phonologically. Together this means that the current theory of movement in
MP is almost identical to SLASH propagation in GPSG/HPSG, the difference
being that the phonology of the trace is absent from the beginning and that
the MP allows intermediate copies.

One crucial idea within HPSG was that not all information is available in
the trace-filler relation, but only LOCAL information. If this idea yields
empirical predictions (I don’t remember), it could be used as a weapon
against the full-identity copy theory of the MP.

Do I would like to ask: Do we find empirical consequences of the idea that
SLASH only carries LOCAL information?

Thanks,

T. (not A.)


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Prof. Dr. Tibor Kiss
Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut - Ruhr-Universität Bochum
+49-234-3225114 // +49-177-7468265