Minimalist program

Perfection

The MP appeals to the idea that the language ability in humans shows signs of being incorporated under an optimal design with exquisite organization, which seems to suggest that the inner workings conform to a very simple computational law or 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 conceptual and physical (phonological) needs.

From a theoretical standpoint, and in the context of generative grammar, the MP draws on the minimalist approach of the principles and parameters program, considered to be the ultimate standard theoretical model that generative linguistics has developed since the 1980s. What this approach suggests is the existence of a fixed set of principles valid for all languages, which, when combined with settings for a finite set of binary switches (parameters), may describe the specific properties that characterize the language system a child eventually comes to attain.

The MP aims to get to know how much of the principles and parameters model can be taken as a result of this hypothetical optimal and computationally efficient design of the human language faculty. In turn, more developed versions of the Principles and Parameters approach provide technical principles from which the MP can be seen to follow.

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 peripheral aspects of transformational grammar.

Technical innovations

The exploration of minimalist questions has led to several radical changes in the technical apparatus of transformational generative grammatical theory. Some of the most important are:

Bare phrase structure

A major development of MP inquiry is bare phrase structure (BPS), a theory of phrase structure (sentence building prior to movement) developed by Noam Chomsky. The introduction of BPS has moved the Chomskyan tradition toward the dependency grammar tradition, which operates with significantly less structure than most phrase structure grammars.

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

1. BPS is explicitly derivational. That is, it is built from the bottom up, bit by bit. In contrast, X-bar theory is representational—a structure for a given construction is built in one fell swoop, and lexical items are inserted into the structure.
2. BPS does not have a preconceived phrasal structure, while in X-bar theory every phrase has a specifier, a head, and a complement.
3. BPS permits only binary branching, while X-bar theory permits both binary and unary branching.
4. BPS does not distinguish between a "head" and a "terminal", while some versions of X-bar theory require such a distinction.

BPS incorporates two basic operations: "merge" and "move". Although there is active debate on exactly how "move" should be formulated, the differences between the current proposals are relatively minute. The following description 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 the verb drink can be put, so too can the phrase "drink water":

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

Furthermore, the phrase "drink water" can not typically be put in the same places as the noun water:

It can be said, "There's some water on the table", but not "There's some drink water on the table".

So, the phrase is identified with a label. In the case of "drink water", the label is drink since the phrase acts as a verb. For simplicity, this phrase is called a verb phrase (VP). If "cold" and "water" were merged to get "cold water", this would be a noun phrase (NP) with the label "water"; it follows 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, there is the following:

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

This can be represented in a typical syntax tree as follows:

or, with more technical terms, as:

Merge can also operate on structures already built. If it could not, then such a system would predict only two-word utterances to be grammatical. If a new head is merged with a previously formed object (a phrase).

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

Here, γ is the label, so that γ "projects" from the label of the head. This corresponds to the following tree structure:

Merge operates blindly, projecting labels in all possible combinations. The subcategorization features of the head then license certain label projections and eliminate all derivations with alternate projections.

Phases

A "phase" is a syntactic domain first hypothesized by Noam Chomsky in 1998. A simple sentence is often 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 described 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 verbs (if even present) are not phases. This topic is, however, currently under debate in the literature.

Criticisms

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 Chomskyan 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 that 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 in light of its status as a research program rather than a theory (see above).