Extension Condition "violations" and Merge optimality constraints

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that many linguistic phenomena previously seen as violations of the Extension Condition can be explained without such violations by using Sideward Merge and optimality considerations within the Minimalist framework.

Contribution

It shows that the Extension Condition is an intrinsic algebraic constraint and that phenomena like head-to-head movement can be derived with minimal optimality violations, expanding the theoretical understanding of Merge.

Findings

All analyzed phenomena can be explained without EC violations using Sideward Merge.

Large optimality violations can be avoided with alternative derivations.

EC has an intrinsic algebraic meaning in the Merge formalism.

Abstract

We analyze, using the mathematical formulation of Merge within the Strong Minimalist Thesis framework, a set of linguistic phenomena, including head-to-head movement, phrasal affixes and syntactic cliticization, verb-particle alternation, and operator-variable phenomena. These are often regarded as problematic, as violations of the Extension Condition. We show that, in fact, all of these phenomena can be explained without involving any EC violation. We first show that derivations using Sideward Merge are possible for all of these cases: these respect EC, though they involve some amount of optimality violations, with respect to Resource Restrictions cost functions, andthe amount of violation differs among these cases. We show that all the cases that involve large optimality violations can be derived in alternative ways involving neither EC nor the use of SM. The main remaining case (head-to-head movement) only involves SM with minimal violations of optimality (near equilibrium fluctuations). We analyze explicitly also the cases of multiple wh-fronting, clusters of clitics in Romance languages and possessor agreement construction in Korean, and how an explanation of these phenomena based on SM can be made compatible with the colored operad generators for phases and theta roles. We also show that the EC condition has a clear algebraic meaning in the mathematical formulation of Merge and is therefore an intrinsic structural algebraic constraint of the model, rather than an additional assumption. We also show that the minimal optimality violating SM plays a structural role in the Markovian properties of Merge, and we compare different optimality conditions coming from Minimal Search and from Resource Restriction in terms of their effect on the dynamics of the Hopf algebra Markov chain, in a simple explicit example.