Unconventional Mergers

This article discusses the nature of the operation Merge, and the possibility of unconventional mergers, with some attention to the issue of representation. Regular Merge has three possible effects, depending on the input. Next to ‘first-time’ merge, there are both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ remerge. The last creates a temporary doubly-rooted structure, which potentially results in a configuration with superficially non-local properties. Furthermore, it is argued that a fundamentally different kind of operation is needed in order to account for the general behavior of parentheses: Parenthetical Merge, which has the effect of blocking scopal relationships, among other things. Finally, a family of construction types is studied in which both phenomena seem to come together: sentence amalgamation.

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