Minimalist program

In linguistics, the minimalist program (MP) 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. In linguistics, the minimalist program (MP) 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. Chomsky presents MP as a program, not as a theory, following Imre Lakatos's distinction. The MP seeks to be a mode of inquiry characterized by the flexibility of the multiple directions that its minimalism enables. Ultimately, the MP provides a conceptual framework used to guide the development of linguistic theory. In minimalism, Chomsky attempts to approach universal grammar from below—that is, proposing the question 'what would be the optimal answer to what the theory of i-Language should be?' For Chomsky, there are minimalist questions, but the answers can be framed in any theory. Of all these questions, the two that play the most crucial role are: The MP appeals to the idea that the language ability in humans shows signs of being incorporated under an optimal design with exquisite organization, which seems to suggest that the inner workings conform to a very simple computational law or a particular mental organ. In other words, the MP works on the assumption that universal grammar constitutes a perfect design in the sense that it contains only what is necessary to meet humans' conceptual and physical (phonological) needs. From a theoretical standpoint, and in the context of generative grammar, the MP draws on the minimalist approach of the principles and parameters program, considered to be the ultimate standard theoretical model that generative linguistics has developed since the 1980s. What this approach suggests is the existence of a fixed set of principles valid for all languages, which, when combined with settings for a finite set of binary switches (parameters), may describe the specific properties that characterize the language system a child eventually comes to attain. The MP aims to get to know how much of the principles and parameters model can be taken as a result of this hypothetical optimal and computationally efficient design of the human language faculty. 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 1990s, but were still peripheral aspects of transformational grammar. 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: A major development of MP inquiry is bare phrase structure (BPS), a theory of phrase structure (sentence building prior to movement) developed by Noam Chomsky. The introduction of BPS has moved the Chomskyan tradition toward the dependency grammar tradition, which operates with significantly less structure than most phrase structure grammars.