Minimalism

10 Key excerpts on "Minimalism"

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  eBook - ePub

  Philosophy of Linguistics

  • Dov M. Gabbay, Paul Thagard, John Woods(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • North Holland

    (Publisher)

  0 : Wolfram Hinzen

  Overview

  Minimalism, like earlier incarnations of generative linguistic theory, is a quest for linguistic explanation. Even more than its predecessors, it pursues this overarching concern with an emphasis on explanatory factors that were largely outside the scope of the earlier theories, and that have only recently acquired a measure of promise and feasibility for the particular domain of language: general explanatory principles such as computational efficiency and related economy principles that are not specific to language or humans and may not even be specific to the organic world as such. This chapter introduces the minimalist framework with an emphasis on linguistic explanation. Section 2 characterizes Minimalism's rationale, its vision of the structural architecture of the language faculty, its place in the generative tradition, and its descriptive apparatus and methodological basis, illustrating all of these with some linguistic analyses. Section 3 turns to philosophical aspects, relating specifically to Minimalism's underlying philosophy of science and its idea of a ‘mind science’. Section 4 presents the standard Minimalist account of the computational system of language, elaborating on some potential problems with this account. Section 5 concludes. Throughout, I emphasize the sense in which Minimalism is, more and differently than its predecessors, also intrinsically an approach to the evolution of language.

  1 Minimalism as a Mode of Inquiry

  1.1 Description versus explanation

  Linguistic theory is nowhere near complete. The precise characterization of basic construction types such as passives, islands, existentials or possessives even within single languages is wide open, and there can be no doubt cross-linguistic descriptive work will continue for a long time to come. All that is in the absence of an agreement of what the overall descriptive and explanatory framework of linguistic theory should be, and in fact relatively little discussion on the issue of frameworks among theoretical linguists, who usually simply think of themselves as belonging to one or another particular school. Despite all that — and perhaps because of it — Minimalism centrally aims to transgress descriptive work in linguistics in favour of a form of explanation that is, in a sense to be clarified, ‘principled’ and that makes us understand why the apparent laws of language are the ones they are-in short, why things fall into the cross-linguistic patterns that they seem to do. Any such attempt will naturally involve a scrutiny of the question of what these principles have been taken to be, and it will also likely lead to a re-conceptualization of many of them, hence also to new descriptive work in the study of languages. Yet, it is worth emphasizing that the attempt is to ‘rationalize’ language more than to describe it.1

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  Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language and Linguistics

  • Alex Barber, Robert J Stainton(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  Another fundamental idea, shared to some extent by all approaches, is that linguistic form is the media-tion between a thought and an utterance; that is, that linguistic form enables the expression of meaning in sound (and writing). Chomsky’s ‘minimalist enqui-ries’ begin by re-examining this basic idea. From his earliest work onward, Chomsky’s approach to linguistics has always been to ask what the simplest kind of language might be, and then to ask why actual human languages are not this simple. Thus, as described above, Syntactic structures establishes that sentences of a natural language cannot be generated just by rules (phrase-structure rules) of a certain low level of complexity, but require a more complex kind of rule, one that in turn requires a whole theory of linguistic representations which can be subject to transformation. ‘Why aren’t sound and meaning fully aligned?’ is a recently formulated minimalist question; the answer is that organizations of the sentence as meaning are not isomorphic with large-scale organizations of the sentence as sound. In Chomsky’s always-provocative terminology, the question is why language is ‘imper-fect.’ Consider, for example, the Noun Phrase that expresses the thing eaten in ‘John ate the cheese’; here this unit of meaning is after the verb, but it is before the verb in ‘the cheese was eaten’ and the word ‘what’ (which substitutes for it, i.e., ‘the cheese’) is at the beginning of the sentence in ‘what did John eat?’ Perhaps the unit of meaning does not always stay in the same place because some other principle, possibly involving the informational structuring of the utter-ance, forces it to move. Chomsky sees this as an ‘imperfection,’ and seeks to explain why moving the unit is a necessary compromise among the various demands placed on linguistic form by the requirement that speech expresses meaning.

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  Understanding Minimalism

  • Norbert Hornstein, Jairo Nunes, Kleanthes K. Grohmann(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This possibility is worth emphasizing as it highlights an important feature of Minimalism: Minimalism is not a theory so much as a program for research. The program will be successful just in case trying to work out its main ideas leads to the development of interesting analyses and suitable theories. In this sense, there’s no unique minimalist theory, though there may be a family of approaches that gain inspiration from similar sources. Theories are true or false. Programs are fecund or sterile. Minimalism aims to see whether it’s possible to interpret the general methodological benchmarks of theory evaluation in the particular setting of current syntactic research in ways that lead in fruitful and interesting directions. The immediate problem is not to choose among competing implementations of these methodological yardsticks but to develop even a single, non-trivial variant. 6 Understanding Minimalism One last point. There’s no a priori reason to think that approaching grammatical issues in this way guarantees success. It’s possible that the language faculty is just ‘‘ugly,’’ ‘‘inelegant,’’ ‘‘profligate,’’ ‘‘unnatural,’’ and massively redundant. If so, the minimalist project will fail. However, one can’t know if this is so before one tries. And, of course, if the program proves successful, the next question is why the language faculty has proper-ties such as elegance and parsimony. 7 1.3 Big facts, economy, and some minimalist projects The question before us now is how to implement notions like elegance, beauty, parsimony, naturalness, etc. in the current linguistic context. One way into this question is to recruit those facts about language that any theory worthy of consideration must address. We can then place these ‘‘big facts’’ as further boundary conditions on theoretical adequacy. We already have one such big fact, namely that the theory have a P&P-architecture.

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  German: Syntactic Problems – Problematic Syntax

  • Werner Abraham, Elly van Gelderen(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  the Principles and Parameters approach to syntax of Chomsky (1981, 1986a,b). This theory is not restrictive enough to indicate which ones of the different approaches are superior to the other. In this respect, the Minimalist program seems to introduce a healthy amount of strictness to the field, at least given the implementation outlined in section two above. The introduction of the concept parameter in the pre-minimalistic theory, i.e. principles of language taking more than one value and hence the theoretical correlate to cross-linguistic variation, was an important step forward, since it enabled us to describe all human languages as different instances of the same basic object. However, the parameter concept itself was rather fuzzy, and most attempts to find constructions in different languages correlated by a particular value of a single parameter can be severely doubted. In a minimalist grammar, on the other hand, there is no confusion regarding parameters. The range of possible differences between languages is laid down within the system as the dichotomy ±PF -visible, i.e. strong features versus weak features on functional categories. Future will tell if there are other theoretically unclear concepts undermining the validity of the Minimalist program, but with respect to parameters, it is obviously a step forward. This has particular consequences for applied linguistics, as we will see below. Given this background, I will return to a discussion of the early stage of language acquisition, showing how the confusion mentioned above may be eliminated. Consider e.g. significant increase for those who had learned ASL as adolescents. Similar results have been reported for second language acquisition in a study by Johnson & Newport (1989) of native speakers of Korean or Chinese coming to the United States between age three and thirty-nine. In particular, people who had arrived before age seven performed as good as native-born speakers of English.

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  The Minimalist Program

  The Nature and Plausibility of Chomsky's Biolinguistics

  • Fahad Rashed Al-Mutairi(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  But the truth of the matter is that not only has simplicity been a decisive factor in the effort to investigate the structure of language, but it has also been invoked as part of the explanation for the acquisition of language. 16 As noted earlier (Section 2.2.2), considerations of simplicity constituted the basis on which the internal justification of grammars was advanced, and, as such, they formed an integral part of explanatory adequacy. Moreover, one might be impressed by the rate at which the child Chomskyan linguistics 19 acquires his language – a factor that might be seen as implying that insofar as acquisition involves choices, these choices are relatively restricted in number. Thus there is room here for the application of the notion of simplicity to the acquisition process. Third, and perhaps most importantly, to suggest that, with the advent of Minimalism, “the issue becomes which of the conceivable P&P-models is best” is to suggest that the methodological aspect of simplicity is what makes it relevant to Minimalism. But surely there is more to Minimalism than Occam’ s razor. It is a misconception of the minimalist program to regard it as simply an exercise in searching for the “best solution” to Plato’ s problem. For if it were indeed a matter of finding the “best” P&P-model, one would expect to find systematic comparison of different parametric models, but the truth is that there is little contentful discussion of parameters in Chomsky’ s minimalist work. 17 Moreover, even if we grant that the essence of the MP is to act as an arbiter of competing syntactic models, one would expect that this should be in relation to the problem of connecting sound and meaning, and not in relation to Plato’ s problem, for it is a basic tenet of Minimalism, encapsulated in the strong minimalist thesis (SMT, Chapter 3) that language constitutes an optimal solution to the problem of relating sound and meaning.

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  Minimalist Syntax

  • Randall Hendrick(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  “Minimalism,” they observe (Epstein and Hornstein, 1999, p. ix), “is anchored in the suspicion that at certain times and for certain purposes less can be more.” 19 They argue that minimalist syntax “grows out of the perceived successes of the principles-and-parameters approach to explaining human grammatical competence” (1999, p. ix). To put matters more tendentiously than is warranted: given that principles-and-parameters models “solve” Plato’s problem, the paramount research issue becomes which of the conceivable principles-and-parameters models is best, and this issue is (in part) addressed using conven-tional (not uniquely linguistic) criteria for theory evaluation. (Epstein and Hornstein, 1999, p. xi) This is particularly salutory for the following reason. Successful practitioners of P&P syntax might well be frustrated by Minimalism: not only because “the distance between minimalist concerns and concrete analyses often [is] sub-stantial” (Epstein and Hornstein, 1999, p. ix) – no small thing for the great run of analytically minded linguists – but also because it has been hard to discern the relation between the familiar P&P work they are accustomed to doing and the obscure minimalist work they are exhorted to do. Epstein and Hornstein here exhibit a missing link, and what they provide suggests that the route from P&P to minimalist work might be more akin to punctuated equilibrium than to evolutionary gradualism, hence the difficulties a successful P&P re-searcher might encounter. Epstein and Hornstein, however, do not solely want to explain why Minimalism might be so impracticable, they also want to suggest how Minimalism might become more “do-able.” So, they continue, while “[g]eneral precepts are all well and good” (1999, p. xi), rather more specific guidance is required from a research program in any particular domain. Epstein and Hornstein (1999, p. xi) then locate “two types of economy considerations” in minimalist syntax: “ methodological economy .

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  Thinking About Language

  Theories of English

  • Siobhan Chapman(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Very briefly, Chomsky sees language as a formal system; a language is a set of grammatical rules that exist in people’s minds and is capable of producing all the possible sentences. When we study language we have to be careful not to be distracted by all sorts of social and personal INTRODUCING LANGUAGE THEORY 8 factors that might influence how people speak but are nothing to do with that set of grammatical rules. If we look at just the first two sentences of Chomsky’s first book, Syntactic Structures , we can identify some of these ideas: Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the lan-guage under analysis (Chomsky, 1957, p. 11). Chomsky tells us that there are ‘principles and processes’ that put together the sentences of a language, and that the business of syntax, which for Chomsky is the central part of linguistics, is to compile a list of these princi-ples and processes, or a grammar of the language. However there are other views in this short extract that are not made so obvious but are equally important to understanding the ideas about language that are being put forward. Chomsky assumes that a language is essentially made up of sen-tences and that these sentences can be studied in their own right. This is an interesting point of view, but it is far from being obviously true and, as we will see, many linguists would disagree with it. Chomsky is further assuming that sentences exist independently of any situation or occasion of use. There is simply no mention of society or contexts, or even of the people who use a language. This is all very different from Quine’s bold declaration that lan-guage exists only insofar as it used in society. One way of explaining this is to say that Chomsky’s ideas are ‘reductionist’.

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  Grammatical Theory

  • Stefan Müller(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Language Science Press

    (Publisher)

  Linguistic Inquiry and Syntax are journals that almost exclusively publish Mini- malist work and the reader is referred to these journals to get an idea about who is active in this framework. The most prominent researchers in Germany are Artemis Alexiadou, Humboldt University Berlin; Günther Grewendorf (2002), Frankfurt am Main; Joseph Bayer, Konstanz; and Gereon Müller, Leipzig. While innovations like X theory and the analysis of clause structure in GB are highly influential and can be found in most of the other theories that are discussed in this book, this is less so for the technical work done in the Minimalist framework. It is nevertheless useful to familiarize with the technicalities since Minimalism is a framework in which a lot of work is done and understanding the basic machinery makes it possible to read empirically interesting work in that framework. While the GB literature of the 1980s and 1990s shared a lot of assumptions, there was an explosion of various approaches in the Minimalist framework that is difficult to keep track of. The presentation that follows is based on David Adger’s textbook (Adger 2003). 4.1 General remarks on the representational format The theories that are developed in the framework of the Minimalist Program build on the work done in the GB framework. So a lot of things that were explained in the previous chapter can be taken over to this chapter. However, there have been some changes in fundamental assumptions. The general parametrized principles were dropped from the theory and instead the relevant distinctions live in features. Languages differ in the values that certain features may have and in addition to this, features may be strong or weak and feature strength is also a property that may vary from language to language. 4 Transformational Grammar – Minimalism Strong features make syntactic objects move to higher positions.

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  The Written Language Bias in Linguistics

  Its Nature, Origins and Transformations

  • Per Linell(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 I use the label ‘generative (Chomskyan) linguistics’ for various versions of classical (Chomskyan) generative grammar up to, approximately, the launching of the first variants of Extended Standard Theory (EST), e g Chomsky (1957, 1964, 1965, 1970) The label ‘neo Chomskyan’ linguistics refers to works based on the theory of Principles-and-Parameters (Chomsky, 1986) or the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995)

  9 Joseph (1997) argues that detailed examinations of Harris’s characterisations (or accusations) of various philosophers or linguists for being, for example, ‘surrogationalists’ (cf # 1 ) or ‘telementationalists’ (# 66 ) show that these characterisations do not stand up to scrutiny Therefore, they are ‘red herrings’ For Joseph, Harris’s ‘myth theory’ is itself a ‘myth’

  10 In a more detailed account, many of the 101 points would not apply to linguistics indiscriminately With respect to present-day trends, including neo-Chomskyan linguistics, at least two remarks are in placeFirst, as regards Chomsky himself (and his close followers), he has turned away from the task of describing ‘surface’ languages (‘E(xternal) languages’), i e languages such as English, French or Hebrew Indeed, such political and academic constructs are of little linguistic interest, according to neo-Chomskyan theory (see Chapter 8 3 ) This implies much less emphasis than before on notions like ‘grammaticality’ Chomsky’s (1995) interest is now, it seems, more decisively on ‘minimalist’ assumptions of structure (‘principles’ of universal grammar, ‘I(nternal) language’) associated with the underlying language capacity Surface sentences are no longer the basic units of a language, rather, we are dealing with more abstract grammatical constructions (cf a similar attitude in ‘construction grammar’, e g Kay and Fillmore, 1999) Second, there has been a broadening of interests both inside (certain) neo-Chomskyan approaches and, more characteristically, outside these New foci of interest include All this not withstanding, it is obvious that dialogical, interactionist conceptions are still rare Indeed, some fairly recent contributions to discourse theory and pragmatics have proved to be clearly monological in nature Searle’s (1969, etc) ‘speech act theory’, perhaps the best-known action approach to spoken discourse, is a prime example (cf # 57

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  Explorations of Phase Theory: Interpretation at the Interfaces

  • Kleanthes K. Grohmann(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The conceptual necessity of phases: Some remarks on the minimalist enterprise Dennis Ott 1. Biolinguistics and Turing’s Thesis I would like to discuss some very general issues pertaining to recent pro- posals in linguistic theory. In order to do this, it is necessary to review some fundamental aspects of the Minimalist Program (MP). This first sec- tion introduces the framework, emphasizing that the MP is not a theory of language but a bet on what kind of biological object I-language is. One par- ticular theoretical reflex of this ontological (actually, metaphysical) com- mitment of the program – the notion of syntactic phases – will be investi- gated in section 2. Section 3 is a brief comment on some conceptual problems, and section 4 concludes. 1 The overall goal of this paper is very modest: to show that once certain plausible assumptions about the architec- ture of the Language Faculty are adopted, the notion of phase is a concep- tual necessity. The question of what kind of object an I-language is is closely related to the evolutionary origin of natural language. Evidently, our tentative as- sumptions about the nature of the language organ depend to a significant extent on our equally tentative assumptions about the major factors that enter into its Entwicklungsgeschichte (evolution and development). As many authors have stressed, it seems reasonable to assume that an I- language provides an evolutionary advantage, and that a linguistic organism will be favored by selection. While this vague assumption appears relatively innocuous, it does not ipso facto provide any insight into the structure of I- language. The problem of morphogenesis, which arises in the study of the evolution of any biological object, is summarized by developmental biologist Gunther J. Eble, who notes that “form, and more generally, the phenotype, has always remained a fundamental problem demanding explanation in evo- lutionary biology.

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