%0 Journal Article
%T Constraint on Merge: The Roots of the Lexical/Functional Divide
%A Ludovico Franco
%J Theory and Practice in Language Studies
%D 2012
%I 
%R 10.4304/tpls.2.1.01-05
%X This paper addresses the following questions: is (external) merge, the binary operation that combines two elements into a constituent in every variant of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1993, 1995 and related works), an unconstrained operation? If so, what avoid generating ill-formed structures? I will argue here for a simple functional / lexical constraint on Merge, assuming a possible principled binary opposition for the items which enter the syntactic derivation. I will basically follow Kayne (2009), who assumes that the class of nouns (or L-roots) is the only open (lexical) class in grammar, updating the intuitions of Hale and Keyser (1993). This proposal leads to interesting structural and typological consequences.
%K merge
%K minimalist program
%K lexicon
%K biolinguistics
%K morpho-syntax
%U http://ojs.academypublisher.com/index.php/tpls/article/view/6569