Merge and Feature Checking in Minimalism

Lets begin with some assumptions:

Lets say naltural language specifies a universl feature list [F] and each language selects a subset {F1……Fn}. These features are assembled into a Lexicon like,

[FH] for Hindi

[FB] for Bangla

[FA] for Assamese

Now lets make another assumption that there will some possible set of universal features which will be assembled onto each word in the lexicon and will be true for every lexical category. For example, the features of [±Tense] and [±Aspect] will be true for Verbs and features like [±Gender], [±Number] and [±Person] for Nouns. Those features which are assembled into the lexicon are called Interpretable feature.

Now take this example and represent each word with the letters below:

The cat came

 B     D    E

How will Operation Merge take place to derive the sentence structure? First, it will merge D and E to make C and then C will be merged with B and finally B and C will be merged into A. So Operation Merge is reducing syntactic objects into one unified tree.

Next question is what drive merge operation? Who is going to merge with what? X-bar theory says its Theta roles of the lexical category and principles of Theta criterion drives merge. But not everything can be explained with Theta criterion. Rather categorial features should trigger theta role selection. Some verbs like ‘feel’ seems to have an expeiencer and a theme/source. But the them/source can be of different syntactic categories. So theta role doesnot determine syntactic category nor syntactic category determines theta role.

Pat felt a tremor.

Pat felt uncomfortable.

Pat felt Chris had not performed well.

So ‘feel’ is averb and it has a [V] feature. It needs a Noun as its argument and Noun has a [N] feature. But we need to distinguish between being and needing. This difference is to be referred to as a difference in interpretability. Being a verb, feel has a interpretable [V] feature and needing a Noun it has an uninterpretable [N] feature. If a syntactic object has an uninterpretable feature, it must merge with a syntactic object that has a matching feature and once it is done the requirement is met. The uninterpretable feature is checked. Checking is done under sisterhood. An uninterpretable feature [F] on a syntctic object Y is checked when Y is sister to another syntactic object Z which bears a matching fetuare [F].

To distinguish interpretable feature from uninterpretable features, we will write uninterpretable feature with a ‘u’ in front of them. D has an uninterpretable feature [F]. E has an interpretable feature [F]. If we merge them the uninterpretable feature can be checked under sisterhood.

             C

   D                  E

V [uF]            [F]    (imagine a tree, line connecting D & E to C, dn't know how to draw them here)

Kick          me

[uN,V]     [N,acc,I,sg]

“Kick” is a verb (has an interpretable [V] feature) and c-selects a noun (has an uninterpretable [N] feature).

“Me” is a noun (has an interpretable [N] feature) and other features like Accusatice Case, first Person, Singular number.

The head is the needy one, the one that had the uninterpretable feature that was checked by merge.