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Three Grades of Grammatical Involvement: Syntax from a Minimalist Perspective
Author(s) -
HORNSTEIN NORBERT
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/mila.12023
Subject(s) - minimalism (technical communication) , minimalist program , syntax , generative grammar , perspective (graphical) , conviction , transformational grammar , computer science , linguistics , cognitive science , cognition , theoretical linguistics , epistemology , psychology , artificial intelligence , philosophy , human–computer interaction , law , neuroscience , political science
This article presents a Whig history of Minimalism, suggesting that it is the natural next step in the generative program initiated in the mid 1950s. The program so conceived has two prongs: (i) unifying the disparate modules by demonstrating that they are generated by the same basic operations and respect the same general conditions and (ii) assessing which of these basic operations and conditions are parochial to the faculty of language ( FL ) and which are reflect more general features of cognitive computation. What makes Minimalism ‘minimal’ is the conviction that the bulk of the operations and principles in FL are proprietary to that cognitive module. The article illustrates the aims of the project by discussing some ways of reducing Binding Theory to the theory of Movement.