On the Nature of Merge: External Merge, Internal Merge, and Parallel Merge

Abstract

This article argues in favor of a new type of Merge, Parallel Merge, which combines the properties of External Merge and Internal Merge. Parallel Merge creates symmetric, multidominant structures, which become antisymmetric in the course of the derivation.The main empirical goal of the article is to revive a multidominance approach to across-the-board wh-questions and to show that a number of otherwise puzzling properties of across-the-board questions follow naturally from such an account.