MERGE, Transfer and CED Effects

Abstract

In Chomsky et al. (2019), Merge recently conceived as a structure-building operation is reformulated into MERGE, an operation on a workspace (WS). A WS is a computational space where syntactic objects undergo MERGE. The present study aims at accounting for the condition on extraction domain (CED) initially formulated by Huang (1982) by virtue of accessibility, labeling and Transfer. We specifically propose that when a non-minimal projection XP in its base-generated position engenders a labeling problem due to {XP, YP} structure, it undergoes immediate Transfer upon its introduction to resolve such a labeling problem. It readily explains the general ban on extraction out of subjects, adjuncts, and moved phrases. However, passive subject, in-situ subject and exceptional adjunct phrases are each labeled properly so that immediate Transfer does not take place, being transparent to later MERGE/MOVE. The sub-extraction from moved phrases is accounted for as well in keeping with the parallel movement hypothesis (Chomsky 2008) coupled with Rizzi’s (1990) Relativized Minimality, which eventually defends Müller’s (1996, 1998) generalization. All in all, this paper deduces CED effects within the framework of MERGE, in terms of accessibility.