Unfortunately that's true, which is why linguistics is a field of study with its own journals, rather than something that can be summarized neatly in the space

Unfortunately that's true, which is why linguistics is a field of study with its own journals, rather than something that can be summarized neatly in the space of an HN comment :P This model really can account for quite complex language data though. For example, check out this account of auxiliary verbs in Basque: https://www.academia.edu/3112898/A_Distributed_Morphology_Analysis_of_Present_Tense_Auxiliaries_in_Zamudio_Basque https://www.academia.edu/3112898/A_Distributed_Morphology_An... Speaking to your examples: "mala mala mala sunt bona" isn't particularly difficult to analyze this way, you just need to realize that the "mala"s are different words (kind of like the famous English "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" sentence). If I remember the proverb correctly, it means "apples (mala) are good (sunt bona) for a painful jaw (mala mala)". You need an analysis that allows adjectives to Merge with nouns iff they match case, gender and number, so that allows us to create a noun phrase "mala mala" in the instrumental ablative. Then you need a way to have the case, gender and number of subject bubble to the top of the phrase it will make with an auxiliary so that the adjective after the auxiliary is feature restricted to that case, gender and number. Once the elements of the auxiliary verb phrase have Merged, you get: {{ mala, sunt }, bona } Finally you have a rule that allows auxiliary verb phrases to Merge with noun phrases headed by an ablative. If you want the first "mala" to be the subject, then re-Merge it with the whole sentence so far, which in effect moves it to the top of the tree, leaving a trace in its original position. I'm not sure what the second example means. My best guess is that it's the dative singular of 'sol', a matching masculine dative singular of 'solus' and a genitive singular of 'solum', so something like "for the only sun of the land". If that's correct, you need our previously used rule for Merging adjectives iff they match the noun in case, gender and number. Then you can add an additional rule that genitive nouns can be Merged with noun phrases (without any feature selection needing to take place) to form a new noun phrase. Hopefully that shows that Merge and feature selection as mechanisms can be used outside of toy models, to actually account for real data.