ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the history of modern linguistics, to see how these characteristics have been captured by various different components of grammar. It focuses on the operation Merge, which is assumed in bare phrase structure theory to be the fundamental operation in human language, and discuss its properties and problems. The chapter explores a few different interpretations of Merge and related operations, and discusses some implications for comparative syntax, particularly Japanese syntax. Phrase structure in human language is generally "endocentric," in the sense that it is constructed based on a certain central element–called the "head" of a phrase–which determines the essential properties of the phrase, accompanied by other non-central elements, thus forming a larger structure. Phrase structure rules are too permissive as a theory of phrase structure in human language, in that they overgenerate phrase structures that are never actually permitted in human language, those structures that are not headed.
