Understanding Merge

David Adger, Chapter 9

 The Centrality of Merge
We have already previously seen that what Chomsky calls Merge and what Adger calls
self-similarity are powerful processes in language.
See for this my Session Notes 04 and 05 with their trees for words and sentences.
In Chapter 4 of his book, Roberts uses so-called phrase structure rules (PSR) to “gen-
erate” sentences from the top down. The PSR tell you what the sentence immediately
consists of, then, what these parts (NP and VP) consist of, until we arrive at words
(which we could analyze by the same process).
Merge does the exact opposite. Each time, Merge takes two syntactic objects (SO)
and puts them together to form new SOs. The smallest SOs are words and inflectional
affixes. Each time we put two SOs together, we get a
new SO.
If you turn to Adger, 211, you’ll find wine and drink
Merged. The result is a new SO {{drink}, {wine}}, which in
has the order [drink wine] in English, and the order [wine
drink] in Turkish and, BTW in German [Wein trinken].
We first talk about the activity, and then we add the performer of that activity, in this
case the woman in the blue dress, and get another SO {{the woman}, {{drink}, {wine}}}.
To avoid clutter, I will not show the internal structure of the English phrase [the wom-
an]. Adding a little bit to Adger, we can say that we now have a verb phrase VP, which
contains the verb drink as its most important element, the so-called head, and in addi-
tion its object, the NP wine, and its subject, the NP the woman.
We can also turn this into a tree, and it would look like the
thing to the left.
Note that there is no inflection of the verb, no 3rd person
singular -s, as would normally be required in English.
But we will come to that point later.
This tree differs from the {} representation in that the latter says nothing about order.
It can easily be seen that the tree allows for four different orders:
• Subject first or subject last
• Verb before object or object before verb
This gives us the orders SVO, SOV, VOS, and OVS.
In other words, replacing the woman by I we get
• English
I drink wine
I drink wine
• Japanese
watashiwa waino nomu
I wine drink
• Malagasy
misotro divay aho
drink wine I
• Hixkaryana
kana yanimno biryekomo
fish he-caught-it boy
I’ll leave it to you to fit in the other trees. All these STRUCTURES mean exactly the
same thing.
Crucially, this process can apply and reapply endlessly. This is the way in which Merge
enables creative thought.
The way it does so is strictly hierarchical. A mind guided by Merge MUST see linguistic
structures as hierarchical. This is the way Merge builds both the structure and the
meaning of sentences.

Different from Chunking

An example for how Merge is different from Chunking, which relies on experiencing
objects together again and again, are English versus German possessive constructions
according the pattern of the “Anglo-Saxon genitive”:
• Angela’s book’s cover’s title’s color
• Angelas Buch
• * Angelas Buchs Umschlags Titels Farbe
Bilingual English/German speakers will agree that the first and the second example
are fine, whereas the third one is awful: You can have one and only one Anglo-Saxon
genitive in German, whereas one can have infinitely many in English.
This is impossible to know from experience:
• You never encounter infinitely many Anglo-Saxon possessors in English.
So Chunking doesn’t help you in this, but Merge does, because Merge is stupid, and if
you can do something twice, you know it is recursive, that is, you can do it again and
again and again. The real question is:
• Can you take an AS genitive and put it inside an AS genitive? Yes or No?
In German, the answer is NO. In German, AS genitives are NOT recursive. In English,
they are. Here are two representations for this:
In both, we can clearly see what recursion means:
• Applying a process to its own outcome
There is an interesting quirk to this. The same idea can
be expressed by a different structure in which we as-
sume that the tiny little affix -s is the head of these
structures.
Then -s Merges with title to form Poss’. Poss’ Merges
with cover to form PossP1. PossP1 Merges with -s to
form Poss’1 and so on and so forth. Input: PossP, out-
put: PossP. Recursion.
One attractive aspect of this analysis is that we have already encountered structures
of this type on slide 2 of this presentation and on slides 6, 7, and 9 of “Linguistic Uni-
versals.”
It could very well be that ALL phrases in human language look like this:
• Merge: Put a head X together with another SO → X’. Put X’ together with yet an-
other SO → XP
Of course, we need to Merge the right things. Not everything fits with everything in
every language. The two following two sentence are quite different in status:
• Michael gives the book to Anne
• Michael gibt das Buch zu Annette
These are combinatorial properties of Merge in every language that the acquirer of
the language must learn.

The Problem of VSO, Again

We have, however, still a prob-
lem. The Merge operation on
slide 2 and 3 gives us only four
constituent orders instead of 6;
VSO and OSV are impossible to
generate through Merge as we
have encountered it so far.
Since syntax and semantics are closely related, saying that in the tree at the bottom
and to the left in the previous slide the verb should first be merged with the subject
and only then with the object, yielding the Welsh order VSO makes little sense. In all
languages, verbs are most closely related with their objects, not their subjects.
• For more on this, see Adger 221-222.
The clue to the solution is that we can look at Merge in a different way. One crucial
observation:
• So far, we’ve said Merge takes SOs, two at a time, and creates new SOs out of
them. But we haven’t said exactly where these SOs come from.
They come either from the lexicon (words and some affixes are SOs) or are the result
of what we have already done in our workspace.
So far, we’ve simply Merged SOs we either took
from the lexicon or created before.
But Merge is a bit more powerful than that; it can
also LOOK INTO WHAT IT HAS ALREADY CREATED
and take something out of it to remerge it.
The example in the previous slide, taken from “Linguistic Universals,” clearly shows
that. And the simplest explanation for the VSO order in Welsh or, as in Adger, Scottish
Gaelic, is that something very similar is taking place:
• The verb V moves out of the VP – but in declarative sentences!
This is one parameter in which VSO languages are different from English. In them, the
sentence
• Sits the man who is happy in the garden
is not an interrogative, but a declarative sentence.
The upshot of this is that Merge allows you to look into what you have already built
and take stuff out of it.
Adger shows us that in Scottish Gaelic, tense (T) is always realized in front of the subject:
• Tha balach a’glacadh iasg
PRES boy catching fish
Present tense is realized by the auxiliary seen above, and in that case, the full verb V
remains in VP – only if there is no auxiliary present does V move to the front
 Where does it move to?
Arguably, to a position where the information of the
sentence about tense is located.
In that sense, my tree for Welsh to the left is not quite
correct: The verb lladdodd gets its correct form only
after it has moved to T where the Welsh affix for the
past tense is located.
Strictly speaking, it does two “Mergings”: it Merges with VP to form TP, and it Merges
with the tense affix to form the correct form of the Welsh equivalent to killed.
This second form of Merge explains why we have all six orders of S, V, and O, not just
four. There is, however, and additional benefit, and that’s where we are almost at the
end.
It very much seems like English also has a separate tense position T, as in
• The dragon does/did kill the man
• The dragon has/had killed the man
• The dragon is/was killing the man
How can we bring these observations together?
In English, there seems to be a second kind of
movement, namely, movement of the subject
to a position that is even in front of T.
You can see that in the tree to the right.
As in English, the subject always comes before
T, and in Welsh/Gaelic, it always comes after T,
since analysis seems to have a fairly good justification. It also has yet another addi-
tional benefit not contained in the Adger chapter:
• In TP, we have yet another phrase structure that conforms to the general scheme
X + YP → X’; X’ + ZP → XP
All phrases in human languages are essentially alike.
They are either formed by putting SOs together that have already been formed or
are taken out of the lexicon; this is called
• External Merge (EM)
Or they are formed by taking something out of an SO already formed; that is called
 • Internal Merge (IM)
But basically, it’s the same process.

The General Picture

We have arrived at a picture of language where lots of things essentially look the
same. There seem to be three major locations of variation as far as syntax is con-
cerned:
• What elements are present (in the last two pages of the chapter, Adger shows
that instead of tense (T), there can be other crucial elements)? Also, some lan-
guages lack both pre- and postpositions, others adjectives, etc.
• What can be combined (Merged) with what (“The child seems sleeping” doesn’t
work in English; in other languages, it’s fine)
• What can or must be Internally Merged in a sentence, examples being the ques-
tion words that all languages have, such as who, what, etc. They must be moved
to the front in many languages; in others, the CANNOT.
But yet again: Basically, it’s the same process.
Apparently, Merge is a gift evolution gave us, maybe after it had given us others (con-
ceptual capacities such as imagining past, present & future) before.

These children definitely seem sleeping. But only in English.

No need for them to worry about Merge.
It is already there.