The Merge Conspiracy [Part 3]

Part 2 and a half showed us the consequences of the MSO-Merge correspondence, both good and bad. In an ideal world, there should be a way to curtail the bad without limiting the good. Alas, ever since J.J. Abrams got his hands on Star Trek I have been uncertain about the degree of idealness of the world we inhabit.

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).