Linguistic minimalism.html



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Minimalism in the sense described here is not related to Minimalism, the artistic and cultural movement.

Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Noam Chomsky's Minimalist Program.¹ The "Minimalist Program" 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.

Both notions, as described here, are somewhat vague, and indeed the precise formulation of these principles is a major area of controversy in current research.²³ An additional aspect of minimalist thought is the idea that the derivation of syntactic structures should be uniform; that is, rules should not be stipulated as applying at arbitrary points in a derivation, but instead apply throughout derivations. Minimalist approaches to phrase structure have resulted in Bare Phrase Structure, an attempt to eliminate X-bar theory. Recently, it has been suggested that derivations proceed in phases. The distinction of Deep Structure vs. Surface Structure is not present in Minimalist theories of syntax, and the most recent phase-based theories also eliminate LF and PF as unitary levels of representation.

Phase

A phase is a syntactic domain first hypothesised by Noam Chomsky in 1998.⁴ 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.

Bare Phrase Structure

Bare Phrase Structure (often abbreviated BPS) is a Minimalist theory of phrase structure (or sentence building in simple terms) developed by linguist 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':

There's some (water)/(*drink water) on the table. - (The symbol * means the sentence is grammatically incorrect.)

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, simply 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

Criticism

In a short article in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory⁵, which provoked several replies ^{6 7 8 9 10} 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, but 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 contradictory defenses of the Minimalist Program, some claiming that it is not in fact revolutionary or not in fact widely adopted, while others concede these points but defend the vagueness of its formulation as not problematic.

References

Further reading

• Chomsky, Noam (1995). "Bare Phrase Structure", in Gert Webelhuth (ed.) Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program. Cambridge: Blackwell. 383–439.

• Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press.

• Kayne, Richard (2002). "Pronouns and the Antecedents", in Samuel D. Epstein and T. Daniel Seely (eds): Derivation and Explanation in the Minimalist Program. Oxford: Blackwell, 133–166. ISBN 0631227334. 

See also

• Government and Binding
• Principles and Parameters
• Phrase structure rule