0-search and 0-merge

In this chapter, we put forward the hypothesis that all syntactic operations can be uniformly characterized as a composite of two most primitive operations, which we refer to as 0-Search (S₀) and 0-Merge (M₀). 0-Search is an operation such that it picks out n elements contained in a given domain as an input to linguistic computation. 0-Merge is an operation such that given n objects, it forms a set of these objects. We argue that not only “Merge” (be it external or internal) but also various other “relation-forming” operations, such as labeling, Agree(ment), chain-formation, and binding, can be unified under a composite operation M₀^oS₀, incorporating and further extending the notion of generalized Search proposed by Kato et al. (2014) [Chapter 3, this volume]. We also propose a generalized minimality condition on M₀^oS₀, and demonstrate that it can capture various locality constraints on Merge, labeling, Agree(ment), chain-formation, and binding.