The Minimalist Program Lecture 8 Syntax The Minimalist Program

A Preface Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Chomsky’s Minimalist Program. The Minimalist Program grew out of the perceived success of the Principles and Parameters approach to grammatical competence. The Minimalist Program attempts to simplify the theory of syntax. However, the Minimalist Program is still highly conceptual, and there is a wide range of proposals which address syntactic problems in different ways.

Basic Principles Economy of Derivation: Movement (i.e. transformation) only occurs in order to check features (case, agreement, etc.). Economy of Representation: Grammatical structures must exist for a purpose. Uniformity in Derivation: Rules do not apply arbitrarily in a derivation, they apply throughout derivations.

Main Objectives Two of the main objectives of linguistic theories, the generative tradition in particular, are to attain: - descriptive adequacy when the knowledge of speakers of each natural language is explicitly described Operationalized by requiring a definition of “well-formedness” - explanatory adequacy when explaining how possible that people acquire language Operationalized by requiring a characterization of “possible human language”

Description or Explanation Descriptive interest took priority, and explanatory adequacy was shadowed. Many of the described phenomena proved to be more complicated than initially assumed. A whole range of construction-specific and language-specific rule systems were developed.

Principles and Parameters Explanatory adequacy was revived in the Principles and Parameters approach. The assumption is that the theory of UG consists of principles and parameters. Principles are language-independent and construction-independent laws that apply to every language. Parameters capture the differences between languages. The number of parameters and the number of values for each parameter are finite.

The Minimalist Program The Minimalist Program is the latest development in the Principles and Parameters approach. It is minimal in the sense that explanatory adequacy is achieved by “minimizing” the theoretical apparatus. Every detail of the theory is reconsidered in a critical way and is eliminated unless it has a legitimate reason for existence. The theory is kept as simple as possible.

Levels of Representation Preceding versions of generative linguistic theory assumed the existence of four levels of representation: Phonetic Form (PF): an abstract representation of sound Logical Form (LF): an abstract representation of meaning Deep Structure (D-Structure): structure-independent (word) order Surface Structure (S-Structure): structure-dependent (word) order

Minimization Only two levels of representation are maintained in the minimalist approach: - Phonetic Form (PF) - Logical Form (LF) D-Structure is eliminated by collapsing phrase structure rules, lexical insertion, and movements. S-Structure is replaced by Spell-Out.

Distinction What distinguishes the two pairs of representational levels from one another is that: LF and PF are external levels. They feed into systems external to the syntactic component. It is not possible to eliminate them. D-Structure and S-Structure are internal levels. They do not feed into systems external to the syntactic component. They can be eliminated.

Word Order Within the Minimalist Program, word order variation is derived by movement. Constituents, such as verbs, are moved from one position to another in the syntactic representation of a sentence. In earlier version of syntactic theory, word order differences between languages were managed by the theory of phrase structure. The relative order of constituents is not universally fixed.

Parametric Variation a. XP  (Specifier) X’ b. X’  X (Complement) In earlier version of syntactic theory, the relative order is subject to parametric variation: - (SOV-languages) - (SVO-languages)

Universality of Phrase Structure Within the minimalist framework, sentences in all languages have the same phrase structure, consisting of: - a lexical domain (VP) and - a functional domain: CP (Complementizer Phrase), AgrSP (Agreement Phrase for the Subject), TP (Tense Phrase), and AgrOP (Agreement Phrase for the Object)

Universality of Phrase Structure The lexical domain is the locus of insertion of the verb and its arguments. These are inserted in fully inflected form (stem plus inflectional affixes). The functional projections are occupied by features associated with inflectional morphology. The lexical elements move to the functional domain to check their features.

Universality of Phrase Structure Follow the feature checking process of the verb ‘loves’ in the English sentence: She loves babies. AgrS    T   AgrO  V loves

Universality of Phrase Structure Follow the feature checking process of the subject ‘she’ in the English sentence: She loves babies. NP  Left-daughter of AgrSP   Left-daughter of TP  she Left-daughter of VP

Universality of Phrase Structure In the minimalist framework, movement takes care of word order differences between languages. An additional mechanism to derive word order is considered redundant. Redundancy is a valid reason for illegitimacy.

Universality of Movement Within the minimalist approach, possible movements are universal. Hence, a given constituent has to cover the same path through the tree in all languages. A constituent always travels from its position of lexical insertion low in the tree to its Logical Form (LF) higher up.

Universality of Movement The subject she: - gets inserted in the lexical domain (VP) - moves to the functional projection (AgrSP) via (TP) The verb loves: - moves to the functional projection (AgrSP) via (AgrOP) and (TP)

Spell-Out The position where a constituent is pronounced is somewhere between the position of its lexical insertion and that of the Logical Form (LF). The pronunciation position may coincide with: - position of lexical insertion - position of LF, or - both Pronunciation is determined by the rule Spell-Out. Since languages differ in word order, they may differ as to the point in the derivation where Spell-Out applies.

Merge and Move In the Minimalist Program, movements, phrase structure rules, and lexical insertion are combined in the structure-building operations Merge and Move. Merge is a structure-building operation that builds trees in a bottom-up fashion. Move is an operation that moves a tree within a tree.

Summing up In the Minimalist Program, two interface levels are recognized: the PF and the LF. A grammatical utterance is associated with the pair {PF1, LF1} when licensed by grammar. The structure-building operations of Merge and Move proceeds until the derivations of PF and LF diverge. Certain syntactic features must be checked before Spell-Out for phonological well-formedness. A derivation yields a legitimate structural description at LF only if that structural description is made entirely of “legitimate” objects. The economy condition necessitates that all movement operations be required to check a feature. Only the most “economical” is an acceptable derivation.

Assignment for next week Semantics