Syntactic amalgams as dynamic constituency in top-down derivations

The aim of this paper is to provide additional evidence for dynamic top-down derivations (Phillips 1996, Drury 1998, Guimarães 1999, Richards 1999). The phenomenon under investigation here is syntactic amalgamation (Lakoff 1974, Tsubomoto & Whitman 2000), which seems to exhibit a constituency paradox if analyzed from the point of view of either a representational approach or a bottom-up derivational approach, requiring extra hidden structure along with ad hoc ellipsis and sluicing rules parasitic on one another. Once the directionality of derivation is ‘corrected’, and constituency is taken to be dynamic, the paradox disappears with no need for additional construction-specific machinery.