Minimalist program
In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.
[1] Following Imre Lakatos's distinction, Chomsky presents minimalism as a program, understood as a mode of inquiry that provides a conceptual framework which guides the development of linguistic theory.
Merge combines expressions taken from the lexicon in a successive fashion to generate representations that characterize I-Language, understood to be the internalized intensional knowledge state as represented in individual speakers.
)[2] According to Chomsky, a human natural language is not optimal when judged based on how it functions, since it often contains ambiguities, garden paths, etc.
[3] Such questions are informed by a set of background assumptions, some of which date back to the earliest stages of generative grammar:[4] Minimalism develops the idea that human language ability is optimal in its design and exquisite in its organization, and that its inner workings conform to a very simple computation.
Intrinsic to the syntactic model (e.g. the Y/T-model) is the fact that social and other factors play no role in the computation that takes place in narrow syntax; what Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch refer to as faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN), as distinct from faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB).
The exploration of minimalist questions has led to several radical changes in the technical apparatus of transformational generative grammatical theory.
In more recent treatments, the possibility of the derived syntactic object being un-labelled is also considered; this is called "simple Merge" (see Label section).
Movement as feature-checking: The original formulation of the extended projection principle states that clauses must contain a subject in the specifier position of spec TP/IP.
This causes the movement of
[16] The debate about labeling reflects the deeper aspirations of the minimalist program, which is to remove all redundant elements in favour of the simplest analysis possible.
At the bottom of the tree, the minimal domain includes SPEC Y and Z along with a new position formed by the raising of α which is either contained within Z, or is Z.
[20] Recently, the suitability of a labeling algorithm has been questioned, as syntacticians have identified a number of limitations associated with what Chomsky has proposed.
[22] It has been noted that minimal search cannot account for the following two possibilities:[21] In each of these cases, there is no lexical item acting as a prominent element (i.e. a head).
This line of inquiry was initiated in Chomsky (2000), and formulated as follows: Many recent analyses assume that Agree is a basic operation, on par with Merge and Move.
[31] Evidence from reconstruction is consistent with the claim that the moved phrase stops at the left edge of CP and vP phases.
In sentence (2c) below, one can observe that there is no high low tone melody on the verb nɔ́ʔ and tense fá since the wh-word does not move to the edge of the vP and CP phase.
One aim of the Minimalist Program is to ascertain how much of the Principles and Parameters model can be taken to result from the hypothethesized optimal and computationally efficient design of the human language faculty.
In turn, some aspects of the Principles and Parameters model provide technical tools and foundational concepts that inform the broad outlines of the Minimalist Program.
[34] X-bar theory—first introduced in Chomsky (1970) and elaborated in Jackendoff (1977) among other works—was a major milestone in the history of the development of generative grammar.
For complex traditional rules, they do not need to be defined and they can be dwindled to a general schema called Move-α—which means things can be moved anywhere.
It has been argued that the formalist approach can be characterized by the belief that rules governing syntax can be analyzed independently from things such as meaning and discourse.
In Chomsky's theories prior to MP, he had been interested exclusively in formalism, and had believed that language could be isolated from other cognitive abilities.
Rather than arguing that syntax is a specialized model which excludes other systems, under MP, Chomsky considers the roles of cognition, production, and articulation in formulating language.
Minimalism falls under the dependency grammar umbrella by virtue of adopting bare phrase structure, label-less trees, and specifier-less syntax.
[38][39] As discussed by Helen Goodluck and Nina Kazanin in their 2020 paper, certain aspects of the minimalist program provide insightful accounts for first language (L1) acquisition by children.
[40] In the late 1990s, David E. Johnson and Shalom Lappin published the first detailed critiques of Chomsky's minimalist program.
Prakash Mondal has published a book-length critique of the minimalist model of grammar, arguing that there are a number of contradictions, inconsistencies and paradoxes within the formal structure of the system.
In particular, data compatible with hypotheses are filed under confirmation whereas crucial counter-evidence is largely ignored or shielded off by making ad hoc auxiliary assumptions.
Haider further refers to the appeal to an authority figure in the field, with dedicated followers taking the core premises of minimalism for granted as if they were established facts.
