Minimalist program

The Minimalist Program (MP) is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside Generative Grammar since the early nineties. It started with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky presented MP as a program, and not as a theory, following Imre Lakatos's distinction. The MP seeks to be a mode of inquiry, characterized also by the flexibility of the multiple directions that its minimalism enables. That is, ultimately, the PM provides the conceptual framework guiding the development of grammatical theory. For Chomsky, there are just minimalist questions, and the answers can be framed in any theory. Of all these questions, the one that plays an crucial role is this: why language has the properties it has.

Conceptual turns

Perfection

The MP appeals to the idea that language ability in humans shows signs of being incorporated under an optimal design and exquisite organization, which seem to indicate the inner workings of a very simple computer law and general a particular mental organ. In other words, the MP works on the assumption that Universal Grammar constitutes a perfect design in the sense that it contains only what is necessary to meet our needs conceptual, physical and biological.

From a theoretical standpoint, and in the context of generative grammar, PM draws on the minimalist approach of the Principles and Parameters approach, considered as the ultimate standard theoretical model and generativism has developed since the eighties. Basically, what this approach suggests is the existence of a fixed set of principles valid for all languages, and these principles are understood as a kind of set of possibilities that the child learning a language can combine a limited (parameters) according to the specific properties that characterize their mother tongue.

The MP aims to get to know how much of the Principles and Parameters model is a result of this hypothetical optimal and computationally efficient design of our language faculty. In turn, the more developed version of the Principles and Parameters approach, specifically provides technical principles from which PM arises.

Economy

The MP aims at the further development of ideas involving economy of derivation and economy of representation, which had started to become significant in the early 1990s, but were still rather peripheral aspects of TGG theory.

• Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements (i.e. transformations) only occur in order to match interpretable features with uninterpretable features. An example of an interpretable feature is the plural inflection on regular English nouns, e.g. dogs. The word dogs can only be used to refer to several dogs, not a single dog, and so this inflection contributes to meaning, making it interpretable. English verbs are inflected according to the grammatical number of their subject (e.g. "Dogs bite" vs "A dog bites"), but in most sentences this inflection just duplicates the information about number that the subject noun already has, and it is therefore uninterpretable.
• Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, i.e. the structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality.

Technical innovations

There are several radical changes that minimalist questions provoked on the technical apparatus of grammatical theory. Some of the most important are: (i) the simplification of X-bar Theory in favor of Bare Phrase Structure (see bellow) (ii) the simplification of representational levels in the grammatical model, which eliminated the distinction between Deep Structure and Surface Structure in favor of a derivational approach (iii) the elimination of the notion of Government (iv) the inclusion of a single point of interaction between syntax and the interfaces (sound and meaning), called the point of Spell-Out (v) the idea that syntactic derivations proceed in particular stages or domains called phases.

Bare Phrase Structure

A major development of MP inquiry is the so called Bare Phrase Structure (often abbreviated BPS), a new theory of phrase structure (or sentence building in simple terms) developed by Noam Chomsky.

This theory contrasts with X-bar theory, which preceded it, in four important ways:

1. BPS structure is derivational. That is, it is built from the bottom up, bit by bit. X-Bar Theory, on the other hand, is representational. That is, a structure for a given construction is built in one fell swoop, then the lexical items are inserted into the structure.
2. BPS does not have a preconceived structure, while in X-Bar Theory, every phrase has a specifier and a complement.
3. BPS has only binary branching while X-Bar Theory permits both binary and unary branching.
4. BPS does not distinguish between a "head" and a "terminal".

BPS operates with two basic operations, Merge and Move. Although there is current debate on exactly how Move is to be formulated, the differences between the current proposals are minute. The following discussion follows Chomsky's original proposal. Merge is a function that takes two objects (say α and β) and merges them into an unordered set with a label (either α or β, in this case α). The label identifies the properties of the phrase.

Merge (α, β) → {α, {α, β}}

For example, Merge can operate on the lexical items 'drink' and 'water' to give 'drink water'. Note that the phrase 'drink water' behaves more like the verb 'drink' than like the noun 'water'. That is, wherever we can put the verb 'drink' we can also put the phrase 'drink water':

I like to _____________ (drink)/(drink water).
(Drinking/Drinking water) __________ is fun.

Furthermore, we can't put the phrase 'drink water' in places where we can put the noun 'water':

We can say "There's some water on the table", but not "There's some drink water on the table".

So, we identify the phrase with a label. In the case of 'drink water', the label is 'drink' since the phrase acts as a verb. For simplicity, we call this phrase a verb phrase, or VP. Now, if we were to Merge 'cold' and 'water' to get 'cold water', then we would have a noun phrase, or NP, the label of which would be 'water'. The reader can verify that the phrase 'cold water' can appear in the same environments as the noun 'water' in the three test sentences above. So, for 'drink water' we have the following:

Merge (drink, water) → {drink, {drink, water}}

We can represent this structurally as follows:

    drink
    / \
drink water

or, with more terms, as

    VP
    / \
drink water

Speaking abstractly again, Merge can also operate on structures already built. If it couldn't, then we could only speak in two-phrase utterances. So, say we Merge a new object (which we call a 'head') with a previously formed object (which we call a 'phrase').

Merge (γ, {α, {α, β}}) → {γ, {γ, {α, {α, β}}}}

Here, γ is the label, so we say that γ 'projects'. This corresponds to the following tree structure:

  γ
 / \
γ   α
   / \
  α   β

Phase

A phase is a syntactic domain first hypothesised by Noam Chomsky in 1998. A simple sentence is decomposed into two phases, CP and vP (see X-bar theory). Movement of a constituent out of a phase is (in the general case) only permitted if the constituent has first moved to the left edge of the phase. This condition is specified in the Phase Impenetrability Condition, which has been variously formulated within the literature. In its original conception, only the vP in transitive and unergative verbs constitute phases. The vP in passives and unaccusative (if even present) are not phases. This is debated back and forth in the literature, however.

Research on the Minimalist Program

A lot of research has been devoted to the study of the consequences that arise when minimalist questions are formulated. This list is not exhaustive.

Works by Noam Chomsky

• Chomsky, Noam. 1993. "A minimalist program for linguistic theory". En: Hale, Kenneth L. and S. Jay Keyser, eds. The view from Building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1-52
• Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.[1]
• Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: the framework. En: Step by Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik, eds. Roger Martin, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka, 89-155. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.[2]
• Chomsky, Noam. 2000. New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by Phase. En: Ken Hale: A Life in Language, ed. Michael Kenstowicz, 1- 52. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.[3]
• Chomsky, Noam. 2004. Beyond Explanatory Adequacy. En: Structures and Beyond. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, ed. Adriana Belletti, 104 – 131. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[4]
• Chomsky, Noam. 2005. Three Factors in Language Design. Linguistic Inquiry 36:1–22. [5]
• Chomsky, Noam. 2007. Approaching UG From Below. In Interfaces + Recursion = Language?, eds. Uli Sauerland and Hans Martin Gärtner, 1-29. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. [6]
• Chomsky, Noam. 2008. On Phases. In Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory. Essays in Honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud, eds. Robert Freidin, Carlos Peregrín Otero and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, 133-166. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [7]

Introductions

• Adger, David. 2003. Core Syntax. A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press[8]
• Boeckx, Cedric. 2006. Linguistic Minimalism. Origins, Concepts, Methods and Aims. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[9]
• Bošković, Željko and Howard Lasnik (eds). 2006. Minimalist Syntax: The Essential Readings. Malden, MA: Blackwell.[10]
• Hornstein, Norbert, Jairo Nunes and Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2005. Understanding Minimalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press[11]
• Lasnik, Howard, Juan Uriagereka, Cedrick Boeckx. 2005. A Course in Minimalist Syntax. Malden, MA: Blackwell[12]
• Radford, Andrew. 2004. Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press.[13]
• Uriagereka, Juan. 1998. Rhyme and Reason. An Introduction to Minimalist Syntax. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.[14]

Works on the main theoretical notions and its applications

• Boeckx, Cedric (ed). 2006. Minimalist Essays. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.[15]
• Bošković, Željko. 1997. The Syntax of Nonfinite Complementation. An Economy Approach. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.[16]
• Brody, Michael. 1995. Lexico-Logical Form: a Radically Minimalist Theory. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.[17]
• Epstein, Samuel David, and Hornstein, Norbert (eds). 1999. Working Minimalism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.[18]
• Epstein, Samuel David, and Seely, T. Daniel (eds). 2002. Derivation and Explanation in the Minimalist Program. Malden, MA: Blackwell.[19]
• Fox, Danny. 1999. Economy and Semantic Interpretation. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.[20]
• Martin, Roger, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka (eds). 2000. Step by Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.[21]
• Pesetsky, David. 2001. Phrasal Movement and its Kin. Cambridge,MA:MIT Press.[22]
• Richards, Norvin. 2001. Movement in Language. Oxford:Oxford University Press.[23]

Criticism

In the late 1990s, David E. Johnson and Shalom Lappin published the first detailed critiques of Chomsky's minimalist program. This technical work was followed by a lively debate with proponents of minimalism on the scientific status of the program. The original article provoked several replies and two further rounds of replies and counter-replies in subsequent issues of the same journal. Lappin et al. argue that the Minimalist Program is a radical departure from earlier Chomskian linguistic practice that is not motivated by any new empirical discoveries, but rather by a general appeal to "perfection" which is both empirically unmotivated and so vague as to be unfalsifiable. They compare the adoption of this paradigm by linguistic researchers to other historical paradigm shifts in natural sciences and conclude that the adoption of the Minimalist Program has been an "unscientific revolution", driven primarily by Chomsky's authority in linguistics. The several replies to the article in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory Volume 18 number 4 (2000) make a number of different defenses of the Minimalist Program. Some claim that it is not in fact revolutionary or not in fact widely adopted, while others agree with Levine and Johnson on these points, but defend the vagueness of its formulation as not problematic.

Véase también

• Generative grammar
• Generative linguistics
• TGG theory
• Principles and parameters
• Government and binding theory
• Biolinguistics
• Merge (linguistics)
• X-bar theory