Merging Features Computation, Interpretation, and Acquisition

This book presents new work on how Merge and formal features, two basic factors in the Minimalist Program, should determine the syntactic computation of natural language. Merge combines simpler objects into more complex ones. Formal features establish dependencies within objects. In this book leading scholars examine the intricate ways in which these two factors interact to generate well-formed derivations in natural language. It is divided into two parts concerned with formal features and interpretable features - a subset of formal features. The authors combine grammatical theory with the analysis of data drawn from a wide range of languages, both in the adult grammar and in first language acquisition. The mechanisms at work in linguistic computation are considered in relation to a variety of linguistic phenomena, including A-binding, A'-dependencies and reconstruction, agreement, word order, adjuncts, pronouns and complementizers.

Jose M. Brucart is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and has published extensively on the Spanish grammar. He is author of La sintaxis (with M.L. Hernanz) and La elipsis. Aspectos de la elision sintactica en espanol and has also contributed to the main reference grammars of Spanish and Catalan.
Anna Gavarro obtained her PhD at the University of Edinburgh and icurrently lectures on linguistics at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. She has published mostly on Romance and her work includes articles in Language Acquisition, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, and Brain and Language, and a chapter in the reference grammar of Catalan.
Jaume Sola has been an associate professor of Catalan Philology at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona since 1996. His main research interests are inflection and word order (as two crucial aspects of language variation), within the Principles and Parameters-Minimalism framework. He is editor-in-chief of Catalan Journal of Linguistics.

1. IntroductionPart I Formal Features2. Probing Phrases, Pronouns, and Binding, Fredrik Heinat3. Wh-agreement and Bounded Unbounded Movement, Patricia Schneider-Zioga4. Universal 20 Without the LCA, Klaus Abels and Ad Neeleman5. What it Means (not) to Know (number) Agreement, Carson Schütze6. Number Agreement in English and Xhosa, Jill de Villiers and Sandile Gxilishe7. Variable vs. Consistent Input: Comparehension of Plural Morphology and Verbal Agreement in Children, Karen Miller and Cristina Schmitt8. Processing Grammatical Features by Italian Children, Fabrizio Arosio, Flavia Adani, and M. Teresa GuastiPart II Interpretable Features9. When Movement Fails to Reconstruct, Nicolas Guilliot and Nouman Malkawi10. If Non-simultaneous Spell-out Exists, This is What it can Explain, Franc Marusic11. What Adjuncts Tell us About Case, Agreement, and Syntax in General, Joseph Edmonds12. The Diversity of Dative Experiencers, György Rákosi13. Homogeneity and Flexibility in Temporal Modification, Aniko Csirmaz14. The Syntactically Well-behaved Comparative Correlative, heather Lee Taylor15. Some Silent First Person Plurals, Richard Kayne16. From Greek to Germanic: Poly-(*in)-definiteness and Weak/Strong Adjectival Inflection, Thomas Leu17. Acquisition of Plurality in a Language Without Plurality, Alan Munn, Xiaofei Zhang, and Cristina Schmitt