Merge vs. Constructions (p. 14) [via PaperHive@docloop]

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Regarding this part:

Another issue is whether syntax is some- thing involving abstract algorithmic rules like Move and Merge or whether syn- tax is a set of construction-specific rules that are combined with meaning.

Remi van Trijp wrote:

The two are not necessarily incompatible. Constructions also have to be combined somehow (Fillmore suggested a unification-based process), and in Minimalism constructions are not necessarily denied, it is just not interesting for them because they only want to look at the abstract operations that make language possible.

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Stefan Müller wrote:

> The two are not necessarily incompatible. This is correct and something I argue for in this book. I think that lexical approaches (like Minimalism) and phrasal approaches (like most CxG) should be combined as is posible and done in HPSG and SBCG. > Constructions also have to be combined somehow (Fillmore suggested a unification-based process), Not sure we are talking about the same when using the word "combined". Of course descriptions of daughters in schemata (phrasal constructions) have to be combined (unified) with the objects that are inserted into the daughters. This is the same in Minimalism. The merged objects have to be compatible (check a feature or something). See Stabler, 2010. >in Minimalism constructions are not necessarily denied, it is just not interesting for them because they only want to look at the abstract operations that make language possible. I think this is not true. The claim is that Merge is the only operation there is (with the two subcases of Internal and External Merge.). If this is true there is no room for constructions in the CxG sense. Everything has to be done with empty heads rather than phrasal constructions. --- * Stabler, Edward P. 2011. Computational Perspectives on Minimalism. In Cedric Boeckx (Hrsg.), The Ox- ford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism (Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics), Kap. 27, 616–641. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Remi van Trijp wrote:

I think Laura Michaelis' paper ""Making the case for construction grammar" (https://spot.colorado.edu/~michaeli/Making_the_case.pdf) is relevant for the status of constructions in Minimalism (or at least its predecessors). She writes: "According to the rule-free conception, grammatical constructions are ‘taxonomic epiphenomena’ whose properties are predictable from the interaction of fixed principles with language-particular parameter settings (Chomsky 1989: 43)." (p. 33 in the PDF) So perhaps constructions are accepted as descriptive notions (of little interest)?

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Stefan Müller wrote:

Ah, OK.

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