Syntactic relations in Survive-minimalism

Survive-minimalism, as developed in Stroik (1999, 2009) and Putnam (2007), argues for a “crash-proof” syntax that is divested of all derivation-to-derivation and derivation-to-interface operations, such as Internal Merge and Transfer. In this paper, we extend our investigations into Minimalist syntax by showing how it is possible to derive crash-proof syntactic relations using the External Merge operation only. Central to our analysis is the active role that the Numeration plays in building derivations. We demonstrate here that our approach to syntactic relations is in many respects conceptually superior to other Minimalist alternatives, mainly on the grounds that our analysis offers a conceptually grounded explication of how a derivation begins, proceeds and (successfully) terminates without relying on theory-internal stipulations or labels. Contra Boeckx (this volume) and Ott (this volume), we conclude that an optimal design of the C_HL is indeed ‘crash-proof’ after all.