Incorporating Phonological Features into Merge: A Case Study of Noun Compounds in Kansai Dialects

One of the major assumptions of Generative Grammar is that each speaker possesses a computational system in their mind, which takes as input a set of lexical items, and yields as output a pair of representations, one serving as the formal basis of meaning and the other as the formal basis of sound. We interpret this as the Merge operation of the computational system combining the phonological and semantic features of the selected lexical items and yielding the phonological and semantic representations of the sentence. This chapter attempts to incorporate phonological features into the Merge operation. We maintain that the Merge operation in syntax comes in two varieties; there is a rule that forms compounds, called Compound Merge, in addition to a more general rule that forms phrases and sentences, called General Merge. The Compound Merge we postulate accounts for a wide range of noun compounds in Kansai dialects including sequential voicing. It is furthermore shown that Compound Merge and General Merge do not have a fixed order. We are thus led to assume that both are instances of the Merge operation in syntax and that each lexical item has a specific label which determines the particular Merge operation it combines with.