ABSTRACT
This article extends the scope of the “Symmetry Principle of Derivation” proposed in our previous work (Fukui and Takano 1998) to the study of the internal structure of noun phrases. The Symmetry Principle dictates that the pre-Spell-Out derivational computations and the post-Spell-Out (pre-Morphology) derivational computations form mirror images of each other. More specifically, we argued in Fukui and Takano (1998) that language computation maps an array of linguistic elements to a PF representation in such a way that it starts with a lexical item (a head) proceeding in a bottom-up fashion (Merge) and at some point of a derivation, starts “decomposing” the structures already formed in a top-down fashion (Demerge) until the derivation reaches a completely unstructured sequence with a fixed linear (“temporal”) order. The central tenet of the Symmetry Principle is that Demerge, which is an operation undoing the result of Merge, abstractly reflects and reverses the order in which Merge has applied, thereby rendering the applications of these operations “symmetric” with respect to the point of Spell-Out.
