Symmetric Merge in Persian Syntax, Evidences from Across-The-Board Wh and Wh Questions

Sead Mahdi Sadati Nooshabadi, Mehdi Sabzevari, Narjes Banou Sabouri, Mazdak Anoushe
2020 زبان پژوهی  
Asymmetric merge of the sentence constituents enables the Phonetic Form of the language to put the merged constituents in proper order for pronunciation based on the "Linear Correspondence Order". The existence of various constructions like across-the-board wh and wh-questions derived by the computational system of language and different methods for analyzing them proposed by various scholars, have led to reviewing the certainty of the asymmetric relation between the merged constituents.
more » ... (2001) proposes two kinds of merge: external merge and internal merge. External merge takes two disjoint syntactic objects and combines them to form one larger syntactic object. Internal merge, often referred to simply as Move, is an operation "responsible" for displacement in grammar. This intuition implies the possibility that syntactic objects can be pronounced and interpreted in different positions. Considering the characteristics of external and internal merge, Citko (2000, 2003, 2005) proposed the third kind of merge operation namely as Parallel merge. Parallel merge (symmetric merge) is like external merge in that it takes two distinct objects as its input. However, it is also like internal merge in that it combines one with a subpart of the other. The symmetric merge leads to multi-dominance structures in which a constituent is simultaneously dominated by more than one node. Multi-dominance structures have special characteristics and the computational system of language needs special mechanisms for handling them. Important questions which should be answered about these structures are how to linearize them and how the features of shared elements are checked. The asymmetric relation among the constituents of sentence is necessary since only the asymmetric constituents have the prerequisites needed for the Phonetic Form of the language to pronounce the constituents according to the LCA (Kayne, 1994). Apparently, the symmetric constituents are not able to be pronounced since they violate the LCA but the studies of Wi [...]
doi:10.22051/jlr.2020.26101.1699 doaj:949c58ff5cd04795a5f02605ba9bf8a6 fatcat:6654dgykgzebvpfksg2qymtfmy