Minimalism and Phenomenological Evidence

Minimalism and Bilingualism:

We begin with the hypothesis that all people are “bilingual” because every language contains ingredients from several grammars, just as English exhibits both an Anglo-Saxon and a Latinate vocabulary system. We argue that the dominant grammar is defined by productivity and recursion in particular. Although current evidence is sparse, in principle, for a child who shows SLI in a bilingual environ...

Minimalism and Paradoxes

This paper argues against minimalism about truth. It does so by way of a comparison of the theory of truth with the theory of sets, and consideration of where paradoxes may arise in each. The paper proceeds by asking two seemingly unrelated questions. First, what is the theory of truth about? Answering this question shows that minimalism bears important similarities to naive set theory. Second,...

Minimalism and Explanation

Minimalism, Deflationism, and Paradoxes∗

This paper argues against a broad category of deflationist theories of truth. It does so by asking two seemingly unrelated questions. The first is about the well-known logical and semantic paradoxes: Why is there no strengthened version of Russell’s paradox, as there is a strengthened version of the Liar paradox? Oddly, this question is rarely asked. It does have a fairly standard answer, which...

Derivational Minimalism

A basic idea of the transformational tradition is that constituents move. More recently, there has been a trend towards the view that all features are lexical features. And in recent “minimalist” grammars, structure building operations are assumed to be feature driven. A simple grammar formalism with these properties is presented here and briefly explored. Grammars in this formalism can define ...