The Minimalist Program (Current Studies in Linguistics Series) - Hardcover

Chomsky, Noam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262032295 ISBN 13: 9780262032292

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1995

Synopsis

This text consists of four recent essays that attempt to situate linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences. In these essays the minimalist approach to linguistic theory is formulated and progressively developed. 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.

About this title

About the Author

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0262032295
• ISBN 13: 9780262032292
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 420