The Cake is a Lie

In the comments section to Norbert's final remarks on Chomsky's lecture series, Omer Preminger laments the resurrection of representational devices in Minimalism, which started with Chomsky (2004) "Beyond Explanatory Adequacy". I originally took Omer to argue against representational approaches on two levels:

1. They are fundamentally flawed regarding both competence (bad empirical coverage) and performance (no plausible parsing model).
2. Phase-theory is ill-motivated and doesn't get the job done.

After a short email conversation with Omer it actually became clear that this is not an accurate reflection of his views, which he will summarize in a guest post within the next few days summarizes in this follow-up post. Still, now that we've got those two claims laid out in front of us, let's assess their soundness.

I've got no qualms with the second claim. The motivation and empirical use of phases has frequently been criticized in the literature, and phases don't fare any better from a computational perspective. The memory reduction argument for phases is hogwash, phases have no discernible effect on generative capacity (neither weak nor strong), and they do not simplify the learning problem. Norbert captures the state of affairs ever so succinctly: Phases don't walk the walk [...] the rhetoric is often ahead of the results.

The first claim, on the other hand, I can't get behind at all. For one thing, it's a typical case of the cake fallacy: Every cake I've made in my life has been horrible, thus all cakes are horrible (and I'm more of a muffins guy anyways). Even if linguists haven't come up with any good representational models so far --- which I think many syntacticians would emphatically disagree with --- that doesn't mean the approach as such is intrinsically inferior to derivational ones. Now I can already see the flurry of posts about how theory construction is also a probabilistic process where previous failures of specific types of analysis make them less preferable, that the existence of a working representational account is moot if we can't find it, yada yada yada. Step back from your keyboards everyone, I'm actually not interested in arguing this point. My real worry is much more basic. The first claim implies, as is commonly done in linguistics, that there is a meaningful difference between representational and derivational accounts. Well, it turns out that this specific cake is a lie.

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).