Phase-head Initiated Structure Building: Its Implications for Feature-Inheritance, Transfer and Internal Merge

This paper explores an alternative way of structure building in minimalism and proposes that along with other operations in Narrow Syntax such as Feature-Inheritance and Transfer, structure building is also initiated only by phase heads. Consequently, this paper takes one step further Chomsky's (2007, 2008, 2013) generalization that all operations in Narrow Syntax are restricted to the phase level. It further investigates the implications of phase-head initiated structure building for the motivations for Feature-Inheritance and Transfer (Chomsky 2007, 2008, Richards 2007) and shows 1) that no derivation can converge at the C-I interface without Feature-Inheritance (i.e., Feature-Inheritance is necessitated to satisfy interface conditions) and 2) that the operation Transfer is a natural by-product of (Internal) Merge.