Search Results

This chapter presents the principal means within generative theory by which typological generalizations have been captured, namely, by the parameterization of principles of Universal Grammar. It begins (Section 2.2) with a look at early work in generative-based typological analysis, before parameters were introduced. Section 2.3 presents the Government-Binding approach to parameters and Section 2.4 their treatment within the Minimalist Program. Sections 2.5 and 2.6 discuss parameter- and typology-related issues with respect to language acquisition and language change respectively.

This chapter begins by exploring the consequences of a particular instantiation of Uniformity called UTAH (Uniform Theta-role Assignment Hypothesis). Repeated application of UTAH drives the development of MGG from Government/Binding Theory to later Principles and Parameters Theory. The Minimalist Program is considered in light of this development, and aspects of MP shared with earlier theories are highlighted. It is shown how the application of Uniformity in the development of mainstream generative grammar (MGG) has made the Minimalist Program indistinguishable in its essential architecture from Generative Semantics, long discredited. Finally, the chapter outlines the architectures of a theory that are motivated principally by Uniformity rather than empirical considerations, and which moreover introduce an arguably unacceptable cost in terms of theoretical complexity elsewhere in the grammar.

Estimates about the origin of modern human language range from 50,000 to 150,000 years ago. These estimates are based on archeological findings, the presence of tools and beads in e.g. the Blombos cave at 70,000 years ago, and mutations in a gene connected to speech (FOXP2) at about 120,000 years ago. Genetics and archeology work well together and suggest a homeland for modern humans in Africa. What can linguistics contribute to this picture? This chapter shows that a biolinguistic approach has much to offer. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 12.2 presents a very general picture of the Minimalist Program, and in particular its biolinguistic focus. This framework is elaborated on in Section 12.3, especially where the operation Merge is concerned. Sections 12.4 and 12.5 focus on grammaticalization, discussing how it follows from economy and how it is relevant to language evolution; Section 12.6 concludes.

This book is about features and merge, and, more specifically, about the intricate ways they interact in generating expressions in natural languages. This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first part offers a brief scotch of the tenets of the Minimalist Program, which constitutes the current mainstream version of generative grammar. The second part discusses how the contributions included in the present book address some fundamental questions raised by it.

‘A Minimalist Program for Phonology’ defines the computational system commonly known as phonology, and establishes methodology. It provides an introduction to linguistic minimalism and discusses the implications for phonology that stem from the Minimalist Program and the Galilean approach to phonology, as well as a discussion of markedness and the relationship between diachronic and synchronic phonological explanation.

In this chapter, MacSwan provides an overview of the history of research on codeswitching (CS), distinguishing constraint-based (CB) approaches, which posit explicit rules governing language mixing, from constraint-free (CF) approaches, which seek to derive the facts of language mixing from independently motivated properties of grammar and permit no CS-specific constraints. The chapter documents that CB approaches have generally acknowledged the preference for CF approaches, but have come short of implementation; these studies have (1) explicitly confronted the limitations of the formal mechanism, and reluctantly but explicitly introduce CS-specific devices; (2) left the analytic framework inexplicit or inadequately developed so that the issue did not arise; or (3) proposed explicit CS-specific mechanisms, and argued that they are vacuously available to monolinguals too. MacSwan argues that early lexical insertion in the Minimalist Program resolves technological limitations associated with prior models which prevented implementation of a CF solution to CS. Illustrations, offered as proof of concept for the utility of the CF approach, are presented.

This chapter analyzes the minimalist framework for Universal Grammar, with particular emphasis on functional categories and transformations, and revises it step by step in an effort to approach as closely as possible the goals of the Minimalist Program for linguistic theory. The end result is a substantially different conception of the mechanisms of language. The chapter first reviews the guiding ideas of the Minimalist Program, paying attention to a particular language L that determines a set of derivations (computations). It then considers the specificity of language faculty (modularity) and demonstrates that for a particular (I-)language L, the phenomena of sound and meaning for L are determined by pairs. It also discusses the cognitive system of the language faculty; the application of Select or Merge in the course of a derivation; certain assumptions about lexicon; the theory of phrase structure within a minimalist framework; the relation between visibility at the level of Logical Form and accessibility to the computational system; and the theories of movement and economy.

This article offers a minimalist account of determiner phrases in Spanish-English codeswitching data. The minimalist approach to codeswitching developed by MacSwan is selected on conceptual grounds assuming that all codeswitching samples can be analysed in terms of mechanisms independently motivated for the analysis of monolingual data and therefore, codeswitching phenomena can be explained without appealing to ad hoc constraints specific to it. This model is then tested on data from native bilingual speakers of English and Spanish, focusing on the syntax and semantics of determiner phrases. On the semantic side, we examine the parametric variation between English and Spanish with respect to bare nominal phrases. On the syntactic side, we focus on the grammatical reasons that explain one of the most frequent codeswitches in the data, which is the alternation between the Spanish definite article and the English noun

This chapter describes a Minimalist Program for linguistic theory that builds on the principles-and-parameters model and, in particular, on principles of economy of derivation and representation. It begins with an overview of some general considerations, such as the assumption that language is part of the natural world before turning to a discussion of language faculty and one of its components, a generative procedure that generates structural descriptions (SDs). It then considers Universal Grammar in relation to lexicon and a computational system, along with X-bar theory and the notions that enter into a Minimalist Program. It also looks at the level of D-Structure, the internal interface between the lexicon and the computational system, and the concept of S-Structure and its conditions. The chapter concludes by expounding on the economy principles as they apply to both representations and derivations.

This chapter sets out to provide a contribution to our understanding of the feature composition of participles from the perspective of the Minimalist Program developed by Chomsky. It focuses on accounting for participle agreement in French in transitive clauses containing the auxiliary avoir _have. It follows Chomsky in taking transitive participles to be the spell-out of a functional head (an abstract light verb) that serves as the head of a phase, and looks at the featural make-up of the relevant type of functional head. It notes that participle agreement is optional and linked with movement, and proposes that this optionality is a consequence of two different mechanisms provided by UG for driving movement to the edge of a phase, via a selective or unselective Edge Feature. The chapter begins by providing a brief description of the conditions under which past participle agreement takes place with avoir _have in French.

This chapter discusses the main problems and questions that generally arise in relation to information structure notions such as topic and focus. More specifically, it tackles the problems of the definition of topic and focus and of their implementation in the syntax. It begins with the definition of the notions of topic and focus, with particular attention given to the exact specification of what is directly derived from syntax and what is influenced by inferential pragmatic processes dependent on the context. A review follows of the mainstream approaches in the current Generative Grammar, i.e. Minimalist Program and the Cartographic Approach, and of the respective explanatory tools needed to tackle the problem primarily from a theoretical perspective.

This chapter situates the present system within the tradition it comes from, in the process examining foundational concerns about the overall architecture and how this has influenced other lines of research. It begins by reviewing earlier models (the Extended Standard Theory and the Principles and Parameters system) — precursors of the Minimalist Program — to show how the roots of how cyclicity is addressed in this book are very much within the spirit of earlier proposals. It then moves on to the best known cyclic system in contemporary studies, which proposes that derivations run transitioning from one phase to the next. It shows how this system is compatible with the MSO architecture, as they are addressing different aspects of cyclicity — a condition that makes good derivational sense. The theme of justifying the derivational nature of the linguistic architecture is further explored in the middle sections of the chapter. It concludes with two detailed case studies in the literature, which explicitly and creatively use the MSO architecture to make predictions about reanalysis in parsing and specific conditions that arise in language development.

This chapter provides a survey of some work in generative linguistics over the past 45 years. The survey is not intended to be comprehensive, but is designed to give a flavor of some of the examples and topics that are addressed in this book, including the role of data, simplicity, and abstract linguistic forms in grammatical theory, from Chomsky's ‘Standard Theory’ to ‘Government-Binding Theory’ to the ‘Minimalist Program’.

This chapter examines the “strong minimalist thesis” (SMT) that language is an optimal solution to interface conditions that must be satisfied by the faculty of language. SMT emerged within the principles-and-parameters framework of generative grammar and involves efficient computation that requires the restriction of computational resources as well as minimization of computations. The chapter suggests that Merge constitutes the sole computational operation in narrow syntax and proposes a No Tampering Condition (NTC) to prevent Merge from making internal changes to the syntactic objects (SOs) to which it applies. It first reviews some recent and ongoing work in the general framework of the so-called Minimalist Program before turning to the theory of phases, the Inclusiveness Condition, and the Phase Impenetrability Condition. It also discusses two forms of Merge, external merge and internal merge, the latter of which is driven by edge features of lexical items.

This chapter discusses some issues and disagreements in current psycholinguistics. These include the relationship between working memory load, interference, and predictability in online processing and the relationship between production and comprehension. Some empirical differences between data collected by different methodologies (online experiments, acceptability judgments, and corpora) are discussed, with particular attention to the locality versus antilocality of interdependent items. It is argued that psycholinguists need to pay close attention to grammatical rules and conventions, in addition to the data of performance, when setting up their theoretical models. The chapter ends with a critical discussion of efficiency and third factors in Chomsky’s Minimalist Program.