On Virtually Free MERGE
Minoru Fukuda · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2021
In Chomsky, Gallego, and Ott (2019), it is explicitly argued that a lexicon, MERGE (frequently dubbed “Free MERGE”), and nothing else compose a computational system, and that MERGE unconditionally applies to syntactic objects located in a workspace. However, Chomsky (2019) assumes that both the set of the lexicon and that of the workspace are not available to MERGE, without giving any specific reasons. Thus, this article argues that the immunity of the lexicon and the workspace to MERGE can be deduced from Labeling Theory (Chomsky (2013,2015)), which enables us to dispense with the exceptional assumption, in favor of the totally free applicability of MERGE.