Revisiting the freezing principle

Abstract The goal of this paper is to provide an explanation for both the freezing principle and its exceptions in the framework of Chomsky (2021) . In pursuit of the goal, we first review some basic assumptions about Search and Merge in Chomsky (2021) , and then introduce the Minimal Search-free Merge Hypothesis , a hypothesis that is proposed by Goto and Ishii (2024) . It is shown that Minimal Search-free Merge Hypothesis not only presses forward Chomsky’s ( 2013 , 2015 , 2021 ) free Merge hypothesis but also provides empirical advantages over Chomsky’s approach to Search and Merge, arguing that the freezing principle follows from Binarity. We then review Chomsky’s Form Copy analysis of A-positions and elaborate it by extending it to A’-positions, arguing that the exceptions to the freezing principle follow from Form Copy. We also discuss some consequences of the Form Copy analysis, i.e. , traditional criterial freezing effects and crosslinguistic variation with left branch extraction.