Minimalist program

Noam Chomsky, when defining the minimalist program, sought to build upon his own studies from the s onwards concerning generative and transformational grammar. Chomsky summarized generative grammar in It is the study of syntax.

This led to the creation of an algorithm. The book on the minimalist program actually led to a return to the study of transformational grammar. Transformational grammar is where a small change to the deep structure of a sentence, its words and syntax, creates a new meaning within its surface structure.

Simple examples include turning a statement into a question and turning an active sentence into a passive one. Deep structure involves the words and their relationships, while the surface structure is the meaning of the sentence as a whole.

Chomsky put forward two basic theories in the minimalist program. Building on the theory of principles and parameters and, in particular, on principles of economy of derivation and representation, the minimalist framework takes Universal Grammar as providing a unique computational system, with derivations driven by morphological properties, to which the syntactic variation of languages is also restricted. Within this theoretical framework, linguistic expressions are generated by optimally efficient derivations that must satisfy the conditions that hold on interface levels, the only levels of linguistic representation.

The interface levels provide instructions to two types of performance systems, articulatory-perceptual and conceptual-intentional. All syntactic conditions, then, express properties of these interface levels, reflecting the interpretive requirements of language and keeping to very restricted conceptual resources. Noam Chomsky and Andrea Moro. In turn, more developed versions of the Principles and Parameters approach provide technical principles from which the MP can be seen to follow.

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 s, but were still peripheral aspects of Transformational grammar. Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements i.

An example of an interpretable feature is the plural inflection on regular English nouns, e. 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 number of their subject e. Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, i. 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:. 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 label identifies the properties of the phrase. So, we identify the phrase with a label. For simplicity, we call this phrase a verb phrase or VP.

Merge can also operate on structures already built. Say we Merge a new head with a previously formed object a phrase. Note crucially that 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.