This chapter reviews features of FL that cannot be reduced to properties of Merge and their standing in a Merge-based account. These include the modularity of FL, the ECP, the Y-model, subjacency/barriers/phase theories of bounding, relativized minimality, and Wh-in-situ constructions.

The chapter locates the Minimalist Program (MP) in the wider context of the Generative Program (GP). It argues that MP is the next logical step for GP to take given the relative success of two prior projects: (i) explaining how linguistic creativity (the capacity to use and understand an unbounded number of different hierarchically organized linguistic objects) is possible and (ii) explaining how linguistic flexibility (the human meta-capacity to acquire the grammatical recursive procedures that undergird linguistic creativity) is possible. The argument is that given that we (roughly) understand what kinds of recursive procedures natural language grammars (Gs) contain, and given that we (roughly) understand key aspects of the fine structure of the faculty of language (FL), MP asks the obvious next question of why FL has the particular structure it has.

The book argues that the research program of modern Generative Grammar (GG) has been a resounding success. More particularly, it argues that the most current stage of this more general enterprise, the Minimalist Program (MP), has provided profound insights into the structure of the faculty of language (FL). The book outlines the central Minimalist thesis (the Merge Hypothesis) and suggests ways of extending its explanatory reach.

This chapter identifies the central theoretical-empirical claim of MP, the Merge Hypothesis (MH). It rehearses the motivations for a simple combination operation that takes two objects, combines them in the simplest way possible, and treats the combination so constructed as capable of further combination. I review and explicate the claim that the simplest combination operation would do no more than combine its inputs. This means that the combination operation should not impose a serial order on what it combines, nor should it change the properties of what it combines in any way (as either would involve more than “mere” combination). So construing “simplicity” implies the No Tampering Condition (a principle that forbids changing the structures of the elements combined) and supports the idea that expressions so formed have set-like structure. I further provide a more technical specification of the combination operation by specifying its inductive definition. I then show how to derive a bunch of recognized properties of natural language Gs from this Merge conception of combination and review eight of these, again largely following and elaborating Chomsky’s earlier suggestions.

This chapter rounds off the book by recapitulating the argument that the research program of modern Generative Grammar has provided profound insights into the structure of the faculty of language (FL) to explain both linguistic creativity and linguistic flexibility. The proposal is that the Generative enterprise has allowed us to examine what kinds of recursive procedures natural language grammars contain, and to understand key aspects of the fine structure of FL. The Minimalist Program then asks the obvious next question of why FL has the particular structure Generativists discovered it to have. It is argued that the central Minimalist thesis, the Merge Hypothesis (MH), explains how linguistic creativity is the product of a very simple combinatoric operation (i.e. Merge), and then showed how the MH can be extended (into the EMH) by the addition of labels to cover most of the generalizations discovered in the past sixty years of Generative research.

In 1782, Rüdiger published a book titled Von der Sprache und Herkunft der Zigeuner aus Indien (On the Indic Language and Origin of the Gypsies). In that book, Rüdiger postulated an Indian origin of the Romani language and its speakers and its connection to languages of the Indian subcontinent such as Hindi and Bengali. He used a surprisingly modern methodology, collecting his Romani data directly from a Romani speaker (which he admitted to finding “tiresome and boring”) and his Hindi data from a manual written by a missionary. He examined the vocabularies of Romani and Hindi, including numerals like ekh/ek ‘one’, duj/do ‘two’, trin/tīn ‘three’, and so on (the first numeral in each pair listed here is from Romani and the second is from Hindi). Noticing similarities across numerous vocabulary items, Rüdiger surmised that these similarities must derive from the common origin of the two languages. But Rüdiger did not limit himself to examining the vocabulary of Romani and other languages we now call Indo‑Aryan. He wrote: “As regards the grammatical part of the language the correspondence is no less conspicuous, which is an even more important proof of the close relation between the languages” (Rüdiger [1782] 1990: 7).

In this chapter, we consider two large language families, Uralic and Turkic, as well as several smaller language families and isolates. Section 4.1 examines the Uralic language family. The realm of Uralic languages stretches from northern Scandinavia in the northwest and the Great Hungarian plain in the southwest to east of the Ural Mountains, the mountain chain that separates Europe and Asia. In section 4.2 we examine Turkic languages and in section 4.3 languages of Siberia that do not belong to the Turkic or Uralic family. This vast region – larger than any independent country – is home to dozens of indigenous languages still spoken today. Finally, section 4.4 introduces an unusual linguistic phenomenon that is found in Turkish and several of the Siberian languages (as well as some other languages elsewhere), called grammatical evidentiality (or evidentiality, for short).

Dominated by the imposing Great Caucasus Mountains (which includes Europe’s highest mountain, Mount Elbrus), the Caucasus region stretches between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Although historically its location at the center of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene (essentially “the Old World”) made it a vital crossroads for many a century, nowadays it is more often than not overlooked in geographical descriptions. Yet it is fascinating from the ethnolinguistic perspective, not only because of the sheer number of ethnic groups that inhabit, and languages that are spoken in, this relatively small region, much of which is an uninviting terrain, but also because of a number of linguistic peculiarities that the languages here exhibit.

Any map of the languages of Canada and the USA looks like a veritable mosaic, whether we look at a map of indigenous languages or a map of languages that arrived in the Americas in the last half a millennium, first with early European colonizers (not only English, but French, Dutch, even Swedish made an impact in the early colonial period), but also with more recent waves of immigrants. The Ethnologue list of immigrant languages spoken in the USA alone includes 203 languages, running alphabetically from Adamawa Fulfulde (a Niger-Congo language from West Africa; see Chapter 7) to Zoogocho Zapotec (an Oto-Manguean language from Northern Oaxaca, Mexico; see Chapter 12). There are altogether 255 living languages spoken in Canada and the USA. Thus, like New Guinea and Australia (see Chapter 10), Canada and the USA exhibit a high degree of linguistic diversity, muted by waves of language extinction in the last few centuries, but coupled with our incomplete understanding of language relatedness in the region, which creates a very muddled picture of the linguistic landscape.

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to numerous languages that belong to several language families. To get a sense of just how linguistically diverse sub-Saharan Africa is, consider the following figures from Ethnologue. The nearly 1 billion people living in sub-Saharan Africa speak over 2,040 languages. On a national level, there are 16 countries in this region with 50 or more languages spoken. For comparison, in Europe the only country with more than 50 languages is the Russian Federation, most of whose languages are spoken in Siberia rather than in European Russia. In Asia, 12 countries with more than 50 languages are listed.

In this chapter we focus on languages spoken on the numerous islands in the Pacific Ocean, as well as one big island in the Indian Ocean: Madagascar. Most of these languages belong to the Austronesian language family, and it will be our primary concern here; other languages in this region belong to the geographical (but not familial!) grouping of Papuan languages, which will be considered in detail in Chapter 10.