What's Next in Minimalist Grammars?

After a series of technical posts, I really feel like kicking back and waxing all poetic about some lofty idea without the constant risk of saying something that is provably nonsense. Well, what could be safer and loftier and fluffier than to follow Norbert's example and speculate on the future of my field? Alas, how narrowly should "my field" be construed? Minimalist grammars? Computational linguistics? Linguistics? Tell you what, let's tackle this inside-out, starting with Minimalist grammars. Warning: Lots of magic 8-ball shaking after the jump.

The Merge Conspiracy [Part 2.5]

Yesterday we learned that a constraint can be expressed by Merge iff it can be defined in monadic second-order logic. But is this a good thing or a bad thing? The answer is both.

The Merge Conspiracy [Part 2]

Last time in our riveting story of intrigue and cabal, the seemingly innocuous subcategorization requirements encoded via Merge turned out to have a kinky bent to them: by splitting categories into smaller subcategories, we can regulate dependencies such as case-marking and gender agreement using only Merge. But the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper... ... ... ... (in fact, it is so deep I decided to pull a Wachowski and save the second half of the post for tomorrow).

The Merge Conspiracy [Part 1]

A while ago, Norbert wrote several interesting posts regarding the Specifier Island Constraint (SPIC) that caused me to chime in with some technical observations. The basic upshot was that SPIC cannot reliably block extraction from a specifier because we can use Merge rather than Move to displace constituents, in which case SPIC does not apply. Since the comments section isn't the ideal place for discussing such technical matters in an accessible form, Norbert was so kind to endow me with the divine power of publishing my remarks directly on his blog. So here's the first entry of a three part epic, the story of the power of Merge and how it can be used for both good and evil (rated PG-13 for some technical details; but hey, we're all grown-ups here).