Petr Biskup (Leipzig): Labeling and other syntactic operations

This talk proposes certain modifications to the minimalist system, among which labeling plays a prominent role. It argues for a specific model of cyclic Transfer (Spellout). The operation Merge is composed of concatenation and labeling and labeling triggers Transfer. This means that every operation Merge (but not every concatenation) produces a phase. To allow movement and Merge of a new syntactic object, the proposed system employs the delayed labeling. Because of the early Transfer, movement is triggered by a greedy feature on the moving syntactic object. It will be shown that this proposal can derive various syntactic phenomena, for instance, the freezing effect, order preservation in multiple movement, the prohibition of headless XP-movement and the ban on the acyclic combinations of incorporations.