sentences:  This recursive property of Merge has been claimed to be a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes language from other cognitive faculties.As Noam Chomsky (1999) puts it, Merge is "an indispensable operation of a recursive system ... which takes two syntactic objects A and B and forms the new object G={A,B}" (p. 2).Within the Minimalist Program, syntax is derivational, and Merge is the structure-building operation.