I have taken an introductory course in Minimalist syntax and am now doing research on the mathematical structure of Merge as described by Marcolli, Chomsky, and Berwick (2025). They point to Merge and the Strong Minimalist Thesis by Chomsky et al. (2023) as the more linguistic counterpart to their formal mathematical theory.
I am feeling a disconnect between what I have learned in my classes and what is described in these books. In my class, the rules driving and restricting the use of Merge are that of Feature Checking and the Hierarchy of Projections. In this theory, entries of the lexicon contain the features of a given word, e.g. 'eat' [V, uN]. From here, we must (external) merge with an NP to check the uninterpretable feature and fully project up to a VP before joining with v [uN], satisfying our hierarchy and continuing to merge with a subject NP etc...
Discussions of this form are absent from these newer sources. The entire extent of the treatment of features in MCB's first paper is
One considers a given set of lexical items and syntactic features like N, V, A, P, C, T, D, ...
Their examples never show a lexical entry coming with any features. Merge and the SMT focuses more on theta role assignment than on features and hierarchy.
My questions then are:
- What, if any, role do features and feature checking play in this more modern Minimalist framework?
- Is this a thing that changed at a specific point in its development?
- Or is this understanding so basic as to be taken for granted in modern texts?
- Has there been any attempt to describe these concepts mathematically as has been done with Merge itself?
(This last one is of interest because I see it as a potential research direction. If such a quest is bound for failure for some reason outside of my grasp, please let me know.)
