A MERGE-based Approach to Head Adjunction

Chomsky (2017) redefined a syntactic operation, Merge, as MERGE in his lecture at the University of Reading. This redefined operation terminates some subspecies of Merge such as parallel Merge, late Merge, counter-cyclic IM without replacement/infixing. Namely, ‘multidominance’ or ‘two-peaked structure’ cannot survive. This termination suggests that internal pair-Merge of heads (i.e. head-adjunction) is no longer available because it potentially produces multidominance under MERGE. However, this paper proposes that MERGE can redefine internal pair-Merge of heads under Omune’s (2018a, b) pair-Merge of heads formulated by simplest Merge. As a result, this proposal ensures the basic derivation in Chomsky (2015a). Furthermore, the proposal is extended to ‘external’ pair-Merge of heads