Métricas de calidad

If it is now standard to regard Merge and Move as equivalent, it is not standard to regard the product of Merge to be equivalent to the product of Move.2 Let me clarify what I mean by product of Merge (and Move).

2 The similarity between Move (Chain formation) and Projection to be argued for in this section has not gone completely unnoticed in the previous literature, although I think that it has not been exploited to the fullest extent. But let me mention a few suggestive passages I have been able to Wnd.

Chomsky (1995: 246) refers to the element that projects as the target, ‘‘borrowing the [latter] notion from the theory of movement in an obvious way.’’ Likewise, Speas (1990:

43) coins the term Project a by drawing an explicit parallelism with Move a, and further uses the term Projection Chain to capture the idea that a word of syntactic category X is dominated by an uninterrupted sequence of X nodes, much like a movement chain cannot be interrupted (locality principle).

Perhaps the most explicit parallelism between Move and Project is to be found in Koster (1987: chs. 1–2). While Speas’s Project a was based on an analogy with Move a (Speas wanted to let elements project freely, and constrain labeling by independent principles, much like Move a, let Move happen and ruled out unwanted outputs by Filters), Koster’s argument goes beyond the level of analogy. Consider the following passage (Koster 1987: 17):

‘‘It is somewhat accidental, perhaps, that vertical grammatical relations (like the relations between the members of a projection) have hardly been studied from the same perspective as ‘‘horizontal’’ relations like anaphora and movement (an exception is Kayne (198[4])). If we abstract away from the distinction related to dominance, it might appear that [i]

simply sums up the properties of all local relations of grammar [ . . . ]

So far I have used the term Merge to refer to the deceptively simple operation of combining two elements into a set. But Merge is a little bit more complex than this. In its traditional formulation (Chomsky 1995: 243),3 one of the elements merged is said to project, providing the set with a label, which governs the syntactic behavior of the set. So, if V and N merge, one of them—say, V—projects, making the set {V, N} a VP, that is to say, a set that will behave like a V for purposes of further combination (when V(P) merges with T, for example). The label codes the fundamental ‘‘is-a’’ relation of phrase-markers discussed in Chomsky (1955).

Accordingly, if Merge is deWned as combining a and b, the product of Merge is deWned as the set {a, b}, labeled by one of the two units combined, say, a: {a, {a, b}}.

The product of Move was deWned as a ‘‘function chain’’ (or, simply,

‘‘chain’’) in Chomsky (1981: 45). A chain was deWned there as a sequence composed by all the positions occupied by a moved element in the course of a given derivation. That is, a chain was a device to concisely represent the derivational history of a given element. We can think of a chain as a collection of all the occurrences of a given element.

In the Government-and-Binding era, a chain would typically consist of the moved element and all its traces. Within early minimalism, a chain would comprise all the copies of an element. With the advent of the notion of Internal Merge, a chain would be characterized by all the positions into which a given element has been merged. Such positions are standardly represented in terms of their sisters. So SpecCP would be represented as C’. For purposes of this chapter it is not important to go into the details of chain representations. As a matter of fact, because

i. a. obligatoriness

b. uniqueness of the antecedent c. c-command of the antecedent d. locality ’’

Koster (1987: 71) further claims that the parallelism between vertical and horizontal syntax is simply obscured by the distinction between isotopic (in-situ) and non-isotopic (at a distance) property-sharing/syntactic relation, which corresponds to the distinction between Merge (local relation) and Move (relation at a distance).

3 I will return at length to alternative formulations in Chapter 3.

it makes certain properties more conspicuous, I will often use the (non-minimalist) trace notation in the following pages. My only concern here is to establish a new symmetry principle, an equivalence between Projection and Chain, as in (5).

(5) The Product of External/Internal-Merge Equivalence Projection and Chain are symmetric objects

Notice that (5) expresses a symmetry of objects. I will argue in Chapter 3 that (5) is deducible from the symmetry of a rule (on a par with (4)), viz. the very symmetry at the heart of the process of Merge—that which says that Merge(a, b)¼ Merge(b, a). We can characterize this fundamental symmetry of Merge as ‘‘Order-independence’’. But for now, let us keep to (5), and see what it would entail.

Recall that the motivation behind Chomsky’s claim that Internal Merge and External Merge are equivalent was to make displacement follow from the basic operation of the grammar. Seen in isolation, displacement is an unexpected property of natural language, one that is absent from artiWcial grammars, and that was consistently seen as an ‘‘imperfection,’’ requiring special motivation (see Chomsky 2005: 12; 2006c: xi). By reducing it to a process that is arguably part of virtual conceptual necessity (Merge), displacement can be rationalized.4 It doesn’t require extra assumptions.

By applying the same logic with (5), I hope to make seemingly odd properties of chains such as island eVects follow from proper-ties of projection, which I think can be more easily explained because they are associated with a more basic process (Merge).5 Having made the motivation behind (5) clear, let me examine the Product of Merge/Move equivalence more closely.

4 Rationalization is something that symmetry arguments are extremely good at. What is symmetric is not seen as requiring special explanation. What is symmetric follows as a matter of course. This is arguably the main reason why symmetry arguments have Wgured so prominently in theoretical sciences. As Brody (2003: 205) correctly pointed out, ‘‘it is the departures from symmetry [ . . . ] that are typically taken to be in need of explan-ation.’’ I return to the explanatory advantages of symmetry in Chapter 6.

5 This sort of strategy, which consists in solving a more diYcult problem by reducing it to an aspect of a problem already solved, is well known to mathematicians.

Descartes and Abel, for example, often resorted to it.