ABSTRACT
The chapter investigates the syntactic operation Merge in Minimalism. The development of Merge reflects the general strategy of simplification. Triggered Merge requires a purpose, namely a further operation Agree. SMT entails that the simplest possible structure-building device derives the fundamental properties of human language, hierarchical order, and movement. It follows that a combinatory operation that is parasitic on Agree insofar as it needs triggering features is too complex. In contrast, Simplest Merge conceived of as binary set-formation accounts for infinite structure-building without resorting to further mechanisms, such as feature-checking or labeling. Agree captures inflectional properties, which differ across languages while Merge implements the universal property of human language. Consequently, it makes good sense to separate Agree from structure-building. Crucially, the resulting grammar is not crash proof since syntax freely generates structures that may be filtered out at SEM/PHON as unacceptable. SMT argues for uniformity of the internal SYN-SEM system. In its most recent version, Merge, or MERGE is defined as an operation on the workspace. Basically, MERGE is Simplest Merge applied to the workspace. In the ideal case, Universal Grammar contains a single syntactic operation recursively producing symmetric sets obeying general laws of computational efficiency and simplicity.
