Merge

An argument that Merge is binary but its binarity refers to syntactic positions rather than objects.

In this book, Barbara Citko and Martina Gračanin-Yüksek examine the constraints on Merge--the basic structure-building operation in minimalist syntax--from a multidominant perspective. They maintain that Merge is binary, but argue that the binarity of Merge refers to syntactic positions Merge relates: what has typically been formulated as a constraint that prevents Merge from combining more than two syntactic objects is a constraint on Merge's relating more than two syntactic positions.“This book takes head-on the job of providing the foundations for a syntax that allows phrases to occupy two syntactic positions simultaneously. These ‘multidominant’ phrase markers are the vanguard of modern syntax and this volume goes a long way toward showing why.”
—Kyle Johnson, Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
 
“An exemplary book of theoretical syntax, in which a simple idea, multidominance, sets off an impressive exploration into theory and data. Citko and Gračanin-Yuksek elegantly show that multidominant representations, far from being notational variants, reveal crucial properties of the core syntactic operation Merge that cannot be captured otherwise, deepening dramatically our understanding of empirical phenomena such as Right Node Raising and across-the-board extraction.”
—Caterina Donati, Professor of Linguistics, University of ParisBarbara Citko is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. She is the author of Phase Theory: An Introduction and Symmetry in Syntax: Merge, Move and Labels. Martina Gračanin-Yüksek is Professor in the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.