Merge: properties and boundary conditions

The goal of a generative syntactic module is to create linguistic objects that connect sound to meaning. Therefore, a basic structure building operation is needed that combines syntactic objects into more complex objects. In the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) this operation is called Merge. At first sight, both the existence and the working of Merge are close to being trivial, but on nearer inspection this is not at all the case. The reason is that it must be interpreted within a nontrivial system of boundary conditions on its input and output. The following text is a brief explorative discussion of these conditions. Attention is paid to the organization of the syntactic work space, the notation of syntactic objects, and the idea of a strict cycle. It is shown that an evaluation of unconventional concepts such as ‘interarborial movement’ and ‘multidominance’ is almost inevitable. Three possible grammars are defined in the conclusion.