The Emergence of Order in Syntax

The syntactic component of the faculty of language is argued to be a rewiring of a few independently motivated components: features, the conjunction of a successive operation of union-formation (‘Merge’) and of derivational records (‘nests’), and principles of analysis. Since nests linearize terminals (Kuratowski 1921), Kayne’s (1994) LCA becomes dispensable. The study of how features are ordered in discontinuous, analytic and syncretic patterns, governed by the Full Interpretation Condition and