Resumen
According to Chomsky (2005) [Three Factors in Language Design, Linguistic lnquiry 36, 1-22] syntactic objects behave like atoms subject to a Principle of No Tampering (PNT), only labels are visible to syntactic computation, and the optimal constructive device is unstructured Merge, a set -forming operation that yields n-membered sets without modifying the internal structure of their members. Such a minimal view is mutually supportive with Chomsky's recent recursion only hypothesis, but proves conceptually untenable and insufficient to account for the facts if closely scrutinized. On the contrary, as argued here, syntactic objects, far from being atoms, consist of pro properties visible to different operations, labels are inconsistent and useless, PNT is not a principle of Human Language, sets qua sets have no properties and cannot play any role in linguistic computation, and the operation that credibly accounts or I-Language construction is not Merge, which at present does not seem driven by anything and violates Economy, but Satisfaction-via-Unification, a stepwise process that licenses unvalued or unlicensed features of lexical heads and phrases and thereby makes their carriers tractable to CC and eventually meaningful and interpretable to C-I. As to the underlying causes of recent development in the MP, it is claimed here that Chomsky's new radically minimalist approach reflects a deep crisis of faith in internalist philosophy that has resulted in unjustifiable neglect of Lexicology, Semantics, and the Computational Component, and may, if the radical minimalist strategy is pursued, prove fatal to Chomskyan linguistics.
