ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the hypothesis that all syntactic operations can be uniformly characterized as a composite of two most primitive operations, which we refer to as 0-Search and 0-Merge. It argues that not only "Merge" but also various other "relation-forming" operations, such as labeling, Agreement, chain-formation, and binding, can be unified under a composite operation M0◦S0, incorporating and further extending the notion of generalized Search proposed by Takaomi Kato. The chapter explores hypothesis that Merge as commonly formulated in the literature actually consists of more elementary operations, and consequently, it is not really the most elementary syntactic operation, contrary to the widely-held belief. It reviews the notion of occurrence, adopting Noam Chomsky's idea that each occurrence of an syntactic object (SO) is defined in terms of its "mother" node SO. The chapter looks at the nature of agreement, where agreement is obtained as a by-product of labeling.
