Patrick D. Elliott (Leibniz-ZAS Berlin)
Movement as a reflex of higher-order structure building
MERGE-based theories of movement prevalent in minimalist syntax raise major unresolved issues for a theory of the syn-sem interface. Unless a moved expression is of type e, it cannot receive the same interpretation at both its base and derived position - rather, movement should give rise to an *operator variable* dependency. The standard move in the literature is to posit a rule of TRACE CONVERSION (see, e.g., Sauerland 1998, 2004, Elbourne 2001, Fox 2002, a.o.). There are different ways to cash this out - either as a syntactic operation that manipulates lower copies, undercutting the conceptual appeal of MERGE-based theories, or as a non-compositional interpretation rule. In this talk, I'll aim to preserve the conceptual appeal of MERGE-based conceptions of movement, while providing a fully compositional syn-sem interface that doesn't necessitate TRACE CONVERSION. We do this by developing a new perspective on movement - we treat movement as a reflex of *higher order merge*, i.e., we allow in syntactic operations which introduce higher-order functions over structures. Such machinery has been a foundation of formal semantics since at least Montague, but is rarely applied in the realm of syntax. We then provide a compositional way of interpreting MERGE-based derivations using Barker & Shan's continuation semantics.