Insertion minimalist grammars: Eliminating redundancies between merge and move

Abstract

Minimalist Grammars (MGs) provide a setting for rigourous investigations of ideas that have been proposed at a more intuitive level in mainstream work in generative syntax. I address one such idea, namely the possibility that when an element appears to be "displaced", it might be usefully analysed not as having merged into one position and then moved to another position, but rather as simply having merged into one position, and then merged again into another. Intuitively, there appears to be some redundancy in a system where merge and move are unrelated primitive operations, because the structures that they build are of the same sort. I offer a careful illustration of how a MG variant based upon re-merging can eliminate these redundancies. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.