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Merge-over-Move

SYNTAX: One of the economy principles of the Minimalist Program; it says that if the computational system has a choice between merging one element or moving another element, the merger option is preferred. The principle accounts for the word order in (i): 

(i) there read [these books]1 never 
    [vP any students t1]
     (MIT-Icelandic)
Assuming that Merge can only take place at the root, both the subject and the adverb have to be merged to v before the object is moved to the outer spec of v (object-shift); if merger of the subject and the adverb could take place after movement of the object to spec,v, we would derive reverse order of the subject and the direct object.
Merge-over-Move presupposes the existence of numerations or lexical arrays. The intuition behind the principle is that Merge is a simpler operation than Move, assuming that the operation Move is made up of Merge plus Copy.