How was "Merge" proposed in the early 1990s? Hierarchical structures and compositional semantics predate that by decades.
If the proposition was Merge as a "universal" operation, then I'd say there is no evidence that our brains implement such an operation, and that it has a very shallow stack, which is domain dependent. That makes such an operation a meaningless abstraction, not suitable for explaining anything about human behavior whatsoever.
If the proposition was Merge as a "universal" operation, then I'd say there is no evidence that our brains implement such an operation, and that it has a very shallow stack, which is domain dependent. That makes such an operation a meaningless abstraction, not suitable for explaining anything about human behavior whatsoever.