Fig. 3.

From action Merge evolved a domain-general combinatorial operation (generic Merge), and from the latter derive a variety of domain-specific operations including linguistic Merge. The formation of generic Merge corresponds to what Hauser (2009) refers to as “the release of recursion from its motor prison to other domains of thought.” A possibility is that only this generic Merge is our innate capacity, and domain-specific operations develop through ontogeny, much in line with Marcus’ (2006) descent-with-modification version of modularity. If the minimalist thinking is correct that UG contains only Merge and nothing else, it will follow that there is no UG