MERGE and Pair-Merge of Heads

Abstract

Chomsky (2019a,b, 2020) reformulates the standardly assumed conception of Merge in terms of workspace, arguing that the operation only operates over syntactic objects placed in a workspace. Alongside this revised version of Merge, often referred to as ‘(capital) MERGE’ in the literature, he proposes a principle of Resource Restriction which, he claims, MERGE ought to meet. In this paper, I first review the workspace-based operation MERGE and present its empirical and conceptual advantages over its predecessor, Merge. I then examine the two proposals on pair-Merge of heads put forward in Chomsky (2015) and Epstein, Kitahara and Seely (2016) with discussions on their potential conceptual problems with respect to rule ordering and Anti-Locality. I further show that possible implementations of pair-Merge of heads in the MERGE-based system give rise to some new problems in terms of accessibility defined by Minimal Search. Finally, focusing on pair-MERGE of R and v*, I present an alternative analysis to resolve the addressed problems, arguing that the pair-merged structure of R and v* is generated, not in the course of derivation but inside the Lexicon via a merging process I call Lexical Merger, or l-merger.