Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge

Matilde Marcolli, Noam Chomsky, Robert Berwick

Published 2023-05-29Version 1

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.