INTRODUCTION: DELETION PHENOMENA IN THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM

The Minimalist Program

The Minimalist Program, by Noam Chomsky, is a collection of four articles, ‘The Theory of Principles and Parameters ’ (written with Howard Lasnik, –), ‘Some notes on Economy of Derivation and representation’ (–), ‘A Minimalist Program for linguistic theory’ (–), and ‘Categories and transformations’ (–). The first three articles have appeared elsewhere, and are reprinted h...

Testing in the Minimalist Program

In many respects, hypothesis testing in the minimalist program is not very different from what it is for anything that aspires to be a scientific theory of an observable natural phenomenon. The normal practices of science should inevitably apply. Nevertheless, it is true that different sorts of natural phenomena present somewhat different opportunities and challenges, and this may cause good sc...

Collocations in the Minimalist Program

Minimal Computation in the Minimalist Program

This paper presents a parser that embodies principles of the Minimalist Program [Chomsky 1993, 1995] and examines some related computational complexity issues. First, the parser adopts a derivational conception of syntactic operation [Epstein 1995]. Specifically, syntactic relations are completely determined by a derivational structure-building process. Second, it assumes that syntactic operati...

Marr's levels and the minimalist program.

A simple change to a cognitive system at Marr's computational level may entail complex changes at the other levels of description of the system. The implementational level complexity of a change, rather than its computational level complexity, may be more closely related to the plausibility of a discrete evolutionary event causing that change. Thus the formal complexity of a change at the compu...