[YeGoblynQueenne]

I don't know about "everybody nowadays" but I remember Recursive Neural Nets as an architecture introduced by Christopher Manning with the argument that it was better suited to the hierarchical structure of language than existing architectures. I did find it a bit of a bad choice of name, given that it's so closed to Recurrent Neural Nets. All this is from memory though I might check the internets later to see what I misremember.

RNNs are a large class of architectures of varying complexity, from Kallman Filters to LSTMs. It's not clear to me exactly what the wikipedia article means by "linear" but LSTMs for example treat their inputs as sequences and don't try to deconstruct them into parts, like e.g. Convolutional Neural Nets do. So maybe that's what's meant by "linear".