Merge and Mirrors

There are five or so grammatical processes which target heads, in that they attract them, or attach things to them: Affix Hopping, Morphological Lowering, Verb or Head Raising, and less obviously, Adverb Placement and the basic Merge operation. Here I will propose a system in which these are manifestations of a single process—COMBINE—which operates in a single cycle, deriving phrasal syntactic structures and the morphosyntactic marking of them simultaneously. “Mirror effects” arise from the operation of COMBINE, but not always—mirrors are size-relative, or “fractal” ¹ in a sense made precise in Sections 2 and 5.