Marr’s levels and the minimalist program

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...

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

Optimality Theory and the Minimalist Program

The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000) and Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, 2004) are not alternative theories logically inconsistent with each other. Optimality Theory is a theory of how universal constraints of grammar interact (Prince and Smolensky 1993, Grimshaw 2005). Minimalism, as Chomsky notes (2000:41), is a research program –not a theory– investigating to what extent...