This discusses two basic mechanisms that characterize the minimalist approach to language, operation Merge and the locality domain, with emphasis on the interaction between them, which occurs with movement. Labeling plays a crucial role in how the two interact in that unlabeled elements cannot undergo movement, cannot function as interveners, and cannot be targeted by movement. Labeling also provides motivation for movement (given the proposal that the presence of an uninterpretable feature blocks labeling) and deduces the ban on feature-checking movement feeding feature-checking movement. The discussion leads to a contextual approach to the EPP, where satisfaction of the EPP is not tied to a particular position. This in turn is put into a broader perspective involving a move toward contextuality in the grammar in general: the contextuality of syntax is shown to manifest in the locality of movement/islandhood (there are no islands as this notion has been traditionally understood – there are no phrases that by their nature, independently of their syntactic context, disallow extraction), the motivation for movement, structure-building, labeling, and the new conception of the EPP.

Under the Principles and Parameters model, movement creates a syntactic dependency between the moved constituent and the trace that it leaves behind. Move, on the other hand, had different definitions throughout the multiple stages of the Minimalist Program’s (MP) development. This vignette reviews major theoretical developments of the notion Move in the MP, namely the copy theory of Move and Move as Internal Merge. It addresses questions such as: How can we justify Move in terms of the Strong Minimalist Thesis? Is Move a triggered operation? How can we realize Move regarding free MERGE, Agree, Phase Impenetrability Condition, and Labeling Algorithm? A concrete example illustrating a minimalist style of derivation involving Move will be provided in this vignette.

Mainstream Minimalism considers linearization (the precedence relation imposed on words/morphemes) as a byproduct of the constraints dictated by the SM system to phrase structure (natively expressed in terms of dominance and sisterhood). This chapter presents the least common denominator of the minority perspective: its main assumption that a relevant part of linearization is strictly dependent on the asymmetric nature of the hierarchical structure. On this view, the induction of linear order is in fact a component of narrow syntax. One of the hypotheses discussed is that the source of the relevant asymmetries is the incrementality of phrase structure building as it flows in time. Starting from Kayne’s 1994) linear correspondence axiom, it reviews some well-known constraints on word order, including the head directionality parameter (Roberts 2010) and Greenberg’s Universal 20 (Cinque 2005). The incremental nature of Merge (first defined in Phillips 1996) leads to the Telepathy Paradox: even if we were able to communicate telepathically, instant communication would remain impossible; we would still need to rely on incremental processing, then to “linearization” in a temporal sense.

The final section of the book is structured to provide pathways forward for other researchers, practitioners, and scientists to use conceptualized peace. In this chapter, I detail the methodological approaches that can guide a study of meaning making, identity, and young people’s development. The chapter begins with a deeper dive into meaning making and ecological validity, as well as how to approach studying them. Then, I argue that the SAGE and MOVE models provide both theoretical and practical insights to study the complex nuance of everyday lived experiences and their role in cognition and psychosocial processes. To do this, I show how these two models connect to conceptualized peace and discuss how they directly informed the research studies from the previous two chapters. The methodological similarities and differences in these two studies also motivates a discussion about the flexibility and broad applicability of conceptualized peace.

Chapter 5 examines syntax, how sentences and phrases are built. It explores the relation between structure and meaning, showing how structure allows us to clarify ambiguity. Readers see how sentences are made up of phrases that in turn are made up of different words. These words belong to specific categories, with the category of the phrase determined by its head. The chapter explains the distinction between lexical and functional categories and presents the two basic processes for building sentences: Merge and move. Readers explore and practice the representation of sentence structure with tree diagrams. They are presented with a template for the representation of structure and shown how to use trees to indicate the difference between complements and adjuncts, and how the tree must represent not only word order but also how different phrases relate to each other. Tense is presented as the head of the sentence, with the verb phrase as its complement. In a parallel fashion, the determiner is presented as the head of the determiner phrase, with the noun phrase as its complement. Different structures such as questions, passives, and relative clauses are introduced and practiced. An appendix details step-by-step how to build syntactic trees.