Structure-preservingness, internal merge, and the strict locality of triads

This paper examines Emonds’ Structure Preserving Hypothesis, and suggests that the insight behind this hypothesis survives reformulation in terms of recent minimalist theory: each structure created by internal merge can also, independently, be created by external merge. As before, this makes movement (as expressed by its successor concept “internal merge”) redundant. From a meta-theoretical perspective, merge has the same formas other local relations, such as “displacement”, reflexivization and agreement. This suggests a generalization in terms of triads: linguistic relations can only affect sisters and/or their immediately dominating node. Variables can be eliminated by successive chaining of triads.