Learnability in a Minimalist Framework: Root Compounds, Merger, and the Syntax-Morphology Interface

The Minimalist Program in syntactic theory seeks to factor cross-linguistic variation out of the syntax, and entirely into other grammatical components, chiefly the lexicon and the interfaces with semantics and phonetics. At the same time, current Minimalist research accords a central role to the operation of "Merge," a generalized transformation combining two autonomous subtrees as daughters of a single node (Chomsky 1995, 1998). We observe that as a consequence, the once peripheral phenomenon of root compounding, as illustrated for English in (1), becomes a critical testing ground for current syntactic theory.