Against Protolanguage

Since Hauser-Chomsky-Fitch (2002) the operation Merge has been taken to be the discriminating boundary between language and non-language. In our talk, we propose some reflections on the simplest stage of this syntactic mechanism, namely the so-called Headhead Merge (Primary Merge in Rizzi’s 2010 Complexity Scale), showing that silent functional categories must be necessarily assumed in order to explain the realization of the most basic hierarchical structure. In this perspective the notion of “protolanguage” turns out to be as contradictory as the notion of “protogrammar”.