Whatever definition we adopt of linguistic recursion relates it to an unbounded combinatorial procedure to build sentences. That procedure operates on words (roots, stems, morphemes, depending on your framework). It is however often disregarded that the words that enter the recursive procedure have an internal structure that comes from a phonological unbounded combinatorial capacity that operates on meaningless units, and is responsible for the open-endedness of human lexicons. Our thesis here is that we are in front of two different implementations of a single underlying combinatorial mechanism that yields discrete infinities of sentences or words, and that they entail each other. Hence, there's no place for a lexical protolanguage stage (Bickerton 1990) nor for a phrase structure exapted from syllable structure (Carstairs-McCarthy 1999). The split in two implementations, syntax and phonology, results in a maximally optimal linguistic architecture that adapts internally to a dual memory, to the conceptualintentional systems, and to our sensory-motor apparatus. This reflects itself in that we can have a phrase within a phrase, but we can't a syllable within a syllable. Now, the identity of the source of syntactic and phonological Merge can be argued for on a variety of factors including that (i) both implementations combine units to form meaningful structures; (ii) both implementations are unbounded and yield discrete entities; (iii) their unboundedness is not likely the result of any external adaptive necessity; and (iv) it is highly implausible that two independent evolutionary events created the two systems separately.
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