ABSTRACT
Clearly the concept of weak generation plays only a marginal role, if any, in the formal investigation of human language. One should look for the nature of human language in its "strong generation" –or ultimately, its procedures strongly generating the structures–rather than its "weak generation," which is related to the set of strings it generates. The hierarchy in terms of weak generation, despite its naturalness and usefulness for other purposes, simply cannot provide a relevant scale along which human language is properly placed. Merge is a crucial operation of the human language faculty, a biological endowment. The distribution of cross-serial dependencies is extremely limited in human language. It is important to keep the requirements of explanatory adequacy and feasibility in mind when weak and strong generative capacities of theories are studied as mathematical questions. The chapter discusses the weak generative capacity to, at least, strong generative capacity, hoping for future development of the formal study of generative procedures themselves.
