I have posted a draft of a new paper on LingBuzz. It’s a continuation of my 2022 Biolinguistics article, though I frame it as a critical analysis of certain recent developments in linguistic theory. The abstract is as follows:
This paper analyzes the FormSet operation as it has been defined and used in the literature specifically in the domain of conjunction structures. It finds that, though its use as a structure building operation must either contradict its definition and justification as a general-purpose preparatory operation or lead to unwanted empirical predictions. It goes on to show that, if we redefine MERGE as applying not to syntactic objects in a workspace but to n-ary sets of syntactic objects in a workspace, that we can retain the justification of FormSet without sacrificing empirical validity. Furthermore, it presents novel empirical arguments in favour of this redefined MERGE—that it correctly predicts the ambiguities raised by conjunction structure, that it correctly predicts a cross-linguistic gap in the plural anaphor system, and that it gives some insight into the system of number “features.”
As always I’m happy to hear any comments you have.
