Understanding Minimalism

Abstract

Understanding Minimalism, first published in 2005, is an introduction to the Minimalist Program - the model of syntactic theory within generative linguistics. Accessibly written, it presents the basic principles and techniques of the minimalist program, looking firstly at analyses within Government and Binding Theory (the Minimalist Program's predecessor), and gradually introducing minimalist alternatives. Minimalist models of grammar are presented in a step-by-step fashion, and the ways in which they contrast with GB analyses are clearly explained. Spanning a decade of minimalist thinking, this textbook will enable students to develop a feel for the sorts of questions and problems that minimalism invites, and to master the techniques of minimalist analysis. Over 100 exercises are provided, encouraging them to put these skills into practice. Understanding Minimalism will be an invaluable text for intermediate and advanced students of syntactic theory, and will set a solid foundation for further study and research within Chomsky's minimalist framework.

Relevance of Linguistic Typology to Formal Theory: Minimalist Inquiry and Word Order

“…constituent structure with breadth and depth, is forced into a one-dimensional object, i.e. a temporal, left-to-right string of sounds or signs (Hornstein, Nunes andGrohmann, 2005:219, Boeckx, 2008:66). This view on word order has hardly changed as Chomsky (2004:109;also Chomsky, 2005:15) Regardless of whether word order is phonology or not, however, serious attention must be paid to linearization, especially in the context of MP.…”

“…This is perhaps why Chomsky (1995b:334-340) devotes a section to word order while claiming, in the same breath, that there is no clear evidence that word order plays a role in the computation of human language (Chomsky, 1995b:334). Similarly, Hornstein, Nunes and Grohmann (2005), in one of the best (known) introductions to MP, dedicate as much as a whole chapter to linearization, when they, in common with Chomsky (1995b) and Marantz (1995), are of the view that linearization is essentially phonology.…”

Complex syntax in the isolated right hemisphere: Receptive grammatical abilities after cerebral hemispherectomy

“…Other constructions used in the instrument, such as the evaluation of the grammaticality of negation and of tense concordance, are also often regarded as engaging semantic, rather than syntactic, resources [25]. Regardless of the linguistic category to which each of these phenomena are ascribed (lexical, syntactic, or semantic), they all do, nevertheless, involve the manipulation of function words and inflectional affixes (e.g., subject-verb agreement) and/or the syntactic movement of elements within the clause (e.g., subject-auxiliary inversion), and we saw no grounds for a priori excluding any of them.…”

Accusative Case-Assignment in Double Object Constructions in Standard Arabic: A Minimalist Approach

“…Chomsky (1995) introduced what is known as "optimal theory" with "the goal to have very general economy principles" (Chomsky 1995). This principle of "economy" requires that each syntactic derivation should involve grammatical operations "as few as possible" (Radford 2009, p.335).Accordingly, optimality has been achieved by dropping out principles such as D-structure, S-structure, X Bar theory and Binding condition (Lasnik, 2003;Hornstein et al, 2005;Boecks, 2006) To provide an explanation for DOCs, Chomsky (1995) has introduced MP principles such as "agreement", "vp shell" and "c-command". These principles help to explain the process of deriving constructions such as DOCs which were previously considered as problems and represent challenges for the Generative Theory (Radford 1997(Radford , 2004(Radford , 2009).…”