The Subject Condition and Determinacy

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of Determinacy within the framework of MERGE as a structure-building operation. A newly conceived notion of MERGE applies to the workspace (WS) that contains syntactic objects. According to Chomsky et al. (2019), MERGE must conform to seven desiderata to efficiently constrain the current derivation. Among the seven desiderata, Determinacy is included as one of them which essentially limits the number of accessible elements into one in a WS. Goto & Ishii (2019a, 2019b), on the other hand, argue that doing away with minimal search, the PIC & TRANSFER alone can account for extraction phenomena. However, concentrating on the subject condition (Chomsky, 1973), this paper is in keeping with Chomsky et al. (2019) that minimal search is in need in accounting for its effect. When the element XP that is to be extracted is base-generated with a head, thereby constituting the set: [{head, XP}], minimal search immediately looks to that specific element XP as a procedure of identifying a syntactic object.