The rule Move, used in various forms in generative grammars to capture displacement or discontinuous constituency, has recently been talked of as an ‘internal’ version of Merge, the operation of simple node or set formation. Internal Merge ‘reconstructs’ the displaced element in its original argument-structural position at the level of logical form via a ‘copy,’ to which it has been identical throughout the derivation. The article addresses the question of how Internal Merge can be formally reduced to standard or ‘external’ merger.
An account of discontinuity is proposed in which copies originate in the lexicon, as seems to be required by a strict interpretation of Chomsky’s (1995b) Inclusiveness Condition, where they can be thought of as binders and variables in lexical logical form. Merger is defined via a small number of type-dependent combinatory rules, which apply to strictly string-adjacent categories to monotonically project from the lexical array varieties of discontinuous dependencies that have been described in terms of various forms of movement, including ‘A,’ ‘Ā’, ‘remnant,’ ‘head,’ ‘parallel,’ ‘sideward,’ ‘covert,’ ‘roll-up,’ and ‘late merger,’ without any attendant constraints other than those projected from lexical categories by merger itself. The analysis extends to a plethora of other discontinuous operations that have been proposed in addition to or instead of Move, including Agree, Label, Transfer, and Delete, all of which are replaced by synchronous monotonic merger of logical form and phonological form of strictly contiguous categories.