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The Minimalist Program
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This twentieth-anniversary edition reissues Noam Chomsky's classic work The Minimalist Program with a new preface by the author, which emphasizes that the minimalist approach developed in the book and in subsequent work "is a program, not a theory."Abstract:
A classic work that situates linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences, formulating and developing the minimalist program. In his foundational book, The Minimalist Program, published in 1995, Noam Chomsky offered a significant contribution to the generative tradition in linguistics. This twentieth-anniversary edition reissues this classic work with a new preface by the author. In four essays, Chomsky attempts to situate linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences, with the essays formulating and progressively developing the minimalist approach to linguistic theory. Building on the theory of principles and parameters and, in particular, on principles of economy of derivation and representation, the minimalist framework takes Universal Grammar as providing a unique computational system, with derivations driven by morphological properties, to which the syntactic variation of languages is also restricted. Within this theoretical framework, linguistic expressions are generated by optimally efficient derivations that must satisfy the conditions that hold on interface levels, the only levels of linguistic representation. The interface levels provide instructions to two types of performance systems, articulatory-perceptual and conceptual-intentional. All syntactic conditions, then, express properties of these interface levels, reflecting the interpretive requirements of language and keeping to very restricted conceptual resources. In the preface to this edition, Chomsky emphasizes that the minimalist approach developed in the book and in subsequent work "is a program, not a theory." With this book, Chomsky built on pursuits from the earliest days of generative grammar to formulate a new research program that had far-reaching implications for the field.read more
Citations
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Book ChapterDOI
The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery
TL;DR: The structural representation of a clause consists of three kinds of structural layers, each layer an instantiation of the X-bar schema: the lexical layer, headed by the verb, the structural layer in which theta assignment takes place, the complementizer layer, typically headed by a free functional morpheme, and hosting topics and various operator-like elements such as interrogative and relative pronouns, focalized elements, etc..
Journal ArticleDOI
The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
TL;DR: It is argued that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation and how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience is suggested.
Book
Introduction to data compression
TL;DR: The author explains the development of the Huffman Coding Algorithm and some of the techniques used in its implementation, as well as some of its applications, including Image Compression, which is based on the JBIG standard.
Journal ArticleDOI
Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue
Martin J. Pickering,Simon Garrod +1 more
TL;DR: A mechanistic account of dialogue, the interactive alignment account, is proposed and used to derive a number of predictions about basic language processes, and the need for a grammatical framework that is designed to deal with language in dialogue rather than monologue is considered.
Journal ArticleDOI
Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies
TL;DR: The SPLT is shown to explain a wide range of processing complexity phenomena not previously accounted for under a single theory, including the lower complexity of subject-extraction relative clauses compared to object-extracted relative clauses.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Argument Structure and Morphology
TL;DR: In this paper, the argument structure of a lexical item is defined as a list of the arguments that the item can have and the function that will relate the old argument structure to the new argument structure.
Journal ArticleDOI
Subjacency and S-structure movement of wh -in-situ
TL;DR: This article argued that the Subjacency effects discovered and used as evidence for LF subjacency are due to the S-structure movement of an invisible entity and therefore that the subjacencies discovered by Nishigauchi (1986, 1990) and Pesetsky (1987) were due to this S-Structure movement, and that an indirect question constitutes a wh-island for overt movement even though the visible part of the wh-phrase is still in-situ at Sstructure.
Book
Anaphoric relations in English
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a survey of the state-of-the-art work in the field of Linguistics and Foreign Languages in the Middle East and Africa.
Dissertation
Agr-based case theory and its interaction with the A-bar system
TL;DR: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1993.