Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge

Understand

The syntactic Merge operation of the Minimalist Program in linguistics can be described mathematically in terms of Hopf algebras, with a formalism similar to the one arising in the physics of renormalization.

• This mathematical formulation of Merge has good descriptive power, as phenomena empirically observed in linguistics can be justified from simple mathematical arguments.
• It also provides a possible mathematical model for externalization and for the role of syntactic parameters.