Merge-over-Move

In minimalism, Merge-over-Move is one of the economy principles; 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.

Link
Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics