The merge theory is ugly and opportunistic. Chomskian linguistics began as an attempt at using formal-language machinery (context-free phrase grammars mostly) f

The merge theory is ugly and opportunistic. Chomskian linguistics began as an attempt at using formal-language machinery (context-free phrase grammars mostly) for describing natural languages. It kinda worked with some modifications in the form of Government & Binding theory, but Chomsky wanted it to be not only a decent formalism, but also a valid theory of language in the mind. Therefore, in the 1990s he said: wait, let's get rid of all the complex stuff (deep structure, surface structure, layers of derivation) and restate everything in terms of one and a half operations (merge and move; move is a kind of merge, therefore 1.5). It _looked_ like it greatly simplified the analysis of languages, but then it turned out that to actually build syntactic parse trees for even quite simple sentences and somehow explain grammatical case assignment, for instance, one needs to augment the basic system with all kinds of hideous bells and whistles (arbitrary "feature checking", literally dozens of "functional projections", weird sequences of merge & move operations, etc.). Contemporary research in computational syntax truly and firmly abandoned contemporary Chomskian linguistics (aka the minimalist program) and is much closer to more traditional types of formal syntax theorising such as HPSG, simply because minimalism is an incoherent unformalisable incomprehensible mess. The title of this article is just a hoax. A good overview: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255 http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255 Edit: grammar