the global workspace, Merge would be a very specifi c subset of that, describing
the process by which the winner of the competition gets to form, occupy the
global workspace and globally broadcast. Merge, in sum, enables the sequence,
but constitutes only one frame of the movie. A formalization of all of this is
offered in Boeckx (2013), which d ivides Merge into four subtasks that may
ultimately have distinct neural realizations (here identifi ed with different kinds
of oscillatory activity at the level of the brain). Assume that elements in capital
letters mean ‘already labeled’ and ‘serialized’, while small caps mean hierarchical
structures that are still in the process of forming.
a) Find mergeable elements:
N, v
b) Combine:
v(v, N)
c) Label:
V(V, N)
d) Forget:
V
Recursion (a new cognitive cycle):e) Find mergeable elements:
V, t
f) Combine:
t(t, V)
g) Label:
T(T, V)
h) Forget:
T
The steps of fi nding mergeable elements and combining them would amount
to the forming of the winning long-distance coalition through the global work-
space. We assume in the diagram that we have captured the merging operation
in the middle of its functioning, which should have started prelinguistically,
whenever cognition developed within the individual’s brain, so the N component
is already interpreted, and the objective here is to merge it with something new,
v. This assumption is not trivial, as it connects linguistic Merge with the extra-
linguistic instances of Merge that led to the acquisition of language, including
the acquisition of words and categories, which should participate from the same
syntactic processes as the building of a sentence (cf. Carey 2009).
Importantly, t he labeling operation comes from the interfaces, as it corresponds
to the global broadcast in which information is integrated and serialization takes
place. This entails that structure building is a separate process from structure
interpretation, a principle known as exoskeletality which opposes views in lin-
guistics that state that structure takes precedence over content and is cognitively
118 Gonzalo Castillo