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The relation holding between words and syntax is at the core of a lively debate. Two competing proposals have been advanced: the lexicalist view, claiming that the lexicon and the syntax are distinct modules of the grammar, and what we shall refer to as the constructionist view typically represented by models like Distributed Morphology, advocating for the redundancy of a notion such as the lexicon and arguing for no divide between syntax and word formation. By facing the debate from the privileged point of view of the mixed production of bimodal bilinguals (Italian – Italian Sign Language), namely users of a sign and a vocal language simultaneously produced, we discuss the interaction of the two grammars at play with respect to their word order, morphology and phonology and draw some consequences relevant to the debate

A tenet of any version of phrase structure theory is that a lexical item can transmit its label when merged with another category. We assume that if it is internally merged, a lexical item can turn a clause into a nominal phrase. If the relabeling lexical item is a wh-word, a free relative results; if it is an N, a full relative results; if it is a non-wh D, a pseudorelative results. It follows that the head of a relative construction cannot be more complex than a lexical item. We show massive evidence that when it is otherwise (e.g., the book about Obama that you bought), the modifier is late-merged after the noun has moved and relabeled the structure.

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In this paper, we critically reexamine the two algorithms that govern phrase structure building according to Chomsky (2005). We replace them with a unique algorithm, the Probing Algorithm, which states that the probe of any kind of Merge always provides the label. In addition to capturing core cases of phrase structure building, this algorithm sheds light on Principle C effects and on the syntax of wh constructions, which we analyze as cases of conflict between two Probes. In these two configurations a lexical item (which should become the label, being endowed with an Edge Feature which qualifies it by definition as a Probe) is merged with a syntactic object that, being the probe of the operation, should also become the label. In one case, this conflict produces two alternative outputs (a question or a free relative) that are both acceptable. In Principle C configurations, one of the resulting output (the one where the lexical item 'wins') produces an object that is not interpretable. This way, Principle C effects are reduced to cases of mislabeling, with no need to postulate a specific condition to rule them out.), as well as in seminars at the University of Siena and at the University of Milan-Bicocca. We thank the audience of these meetings, Gennaro Chierchia and Sandro Zucchi for useful comments and observations, and Carlo Geraci, Andrea Moro and Syntax reviewers for detailed comments on previous versions of this manuscript. However his polemical objective is the notion of label as an extra object distinct from the two items that are merged, as was in Chomsky's (1995) version of bare phrase structure theory. In that early version of the theory, the output of merging of X and Y was not the minimally simple object {X,Y}, but was either {X,{X,Y}} or {Y,{X,Y}}, depending on which category projects. We believe that once a label is defined as a subset of the features of one of the two merging objects, the quest for simplification argued for by Collins can be satisfied. Still, differences between Collins's approach and ours remain. They do not arise so much in the area of phrase structure theory, since the notion of label is replaced in Collins' theory by the closely related notion of Locus, as Collins himself notices (p. 48), nor in the theory of subcategorization, for Collins assumes that lexical features like +/-V, +/-N do exist, although they do not project at the phrasal level. The area in which differences arise is the theory of locality, since a label-less theory à la Collins requires a reformulation of the Minimal Link Condition, with potentially different empirical predictions. We cannot make a complete comparison between our approach and Collins', due to reason of space. See also Seely (2006) for a different attempt to eliminate labels.