In this talk I will discuss the workings a particular operation that underlies several types of syntactic dependencies. Starting by showing that historical processes of grammaticalization involve the emergence of formal features and arguing that such features should not be thought of as ‘interpretable’ and ‘uninterpretable’ features but rather as independent or dependent categorial features, I will show that such a feature architecture can account for various properties of merge, selection, labeling and certain long-distance dependencies.