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Minimalist program
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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.
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. As such, it is characterized by a broad and diverse range of research directions. For Chomsky, there are two basic minimalist questions—What is language? and Why does it have the properties it has?—but the answers to these two questions can be framed in any theory.
Minimalism is an approach developed with the goal of understanding the nature of language. It models a speaker's knowledge of language as a computational system with one basic operation, namely Merge. 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. By hypothesis, I-language—also called universal grammar—corresponds to the initial state of the human language faculty in individual human development.
Minimalism is reductive in that it aims to identify which aspects of human language—as well the computational system that underlies it—are conceptually necessary. This is sometimes framed as questions relating to perfect design (Is the design of human language perfect?) and optimal computation (Is the computational system for human language optimal?) 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. However, it may be optimal for interaction with the systems that are internal to the mind.
Such questions are informed by a set of background assumptions, some of which date back to the earliest stages of generative grammar:
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. On this view, universal grammar instantiates a perfect design in the sense that it contains only what is necessary. Minimalism further develops the notion of economy, which came to the fore in the early 1990s, though still peripheral to transformational grammar. Economy of derivation requires that movements (i.e., transformations) occur only if necessary, and specifically to satisfy to feature-checking, whereby an interpretable feature is matched with a corresponding uninterpretable feature. (See discussion of feature-checking below.) Economy of representation requires that grammatical structures exist for a purpose. The structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality.
Within minimalism, economy—recast in terms of the strong minimalist thesis (SMT)—has acquired increased importance. The 2016 book entitled Why Only Us—co-authored by Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick—defines the strong minimalist thesis as follows:
The optimal situation would be that UG reduces to the simplest computational principles which operate in accord with conditions of computational efficiency. This conjecture is ... called the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT).
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Minimalist program AI simulator
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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.
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. As such, it is characterized by a broad and diverse range of research directions. For Chomsky, there are two basic minimalist questions—What is language? and Why does it have the properties it has?—but the answers to these two questions can be framed in any theory.
Minimalism is an approach developed with the goal of understanding the nature of language. It models a speaker's knowledge of language as a computational system with one basic operation, namely Merge. 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. By hypothesis, I-language—also called universal grammar—corresponds to the initial state of the human language faculty in individual human development.
Minimalism is reductive in that it aims to identify which aspects of human language—as well the computational system that underlies it—are conceptually necessary. This is sometimes framed as questions relating to perfect design (Is the design of human language perfect?) and optimal computation (Is the computational system for human language optimal?) 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. However, it may be optimal for interaction with the systems that are internal to the mind.
Such questions are informed by a set of background assumptions, some of which date back to the earliest stages of generative grammar:
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. On this view, universal grammar instantiates a perfect design in the sense that it contains only what is necessary. Minimalism further develops the notion of economy, which came to the fore in the early 1990s, though still peripheral to transformational grammar. Economy of derivation requires that movements (i.e., transformations) occur only if necessary, and specifically to satisfy to feature-checking, whereby an interpretable feature is matched with a corresponding uninterpretable feature. (See discussion of feature-checking below.) Economy of representation requires that grammatical structures exist for a purpose. The structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality.
Within minimalism, economy—recast in terms of the strong minimalist thesis (SMT)—has acquired increased importance. The 2016 book entitled Why Only Us—co-authored by Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick—defines the strong minimalist thesis as follows:
The optimal situation would be that UG reduces to the simplest computational principles which operate in accord with conditions of computational efficiency. This conjecture is ... called the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT).