Coalescence: A Unification of Bundling Operations in Syntax

Abstract

This article revisits the status of two proposed bundling operations that affect heads: Feature Scattering ( Giorgi and Pianesi 1997 ), which accounts for variation in the distribution of features across functional heads, and M-Merger ( Matushansky 2006 ), which accounts for head adjunction in head movement. While these mechanisms have been situated in the presyntactic lexicon and a postsyntactic module, respectively, I argue that they can receive a unified analysis in terms of one syntactic operation called Coalescence, which bundles structurally adjacent heads in particular configurations. This eliminates redundancies in the architecture of the grammar while maintaining prior empirical coverage, and sheds new light on long-puzzling properties of head movement. The proposal is illustrated in the analysis of several patterns of head bundling in the inflectional and clausal domains.