Questions tagged [minimalism]
Minimalism or Minimalist program (MP) is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.
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What role does feature checking play in modern minimalism?
I have taken an introductory course in Minimalist syntax and am now doing research on the mathematical structure of Merge as described by Marcolli, Chomsky, and Berwick (2025).
They point to Merge and ...
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Are the split INFL hypothesis and split VP hypothesis still relevant today?
As per the title: Are the split INFL and split VP hypotheses, which insert the agreement phrases AgrSP and AgrOP into IP and VP, respectively, still relevant today? Are they mainstream in minimalism?...
user45074
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Why does Chomsky find it surprising that languages are learnable?
From the Minimalist Program, Chapter 1 (20th Anniversary Edition, pg. 16):
It has sometimes been argued that linguistic theory must meet the empirical condition that it account for the ease and ...
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Abandoning (conventional) lexical class
I am curious to know more about approaches to linguistics that aren’t centrally based on central word classes like nouns, verbs, etc. Instead of taking them as important categories, there could ...
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What happens when a bilingual uses a grammatical subject with a different number system than the verb?
For example, Arabic has a ternary number system: singular, dual, and plural. If a bilingual speaker uses an English phrase as a subject that would have dual number in Arabic (but of course the ...
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Turing-completeness of Minimalism and HPSG
I read several times that HPSG and Minimalism are Turing-complete. Could someone explain (or tell me some references) why this is the case? And does this constitute a major problem since natural ...
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According to the Elsewhere Principle, can a syntactic rule block a morphological one, or a morphological rule a phonological one?
I read up on the Elsewhere Principle. In the linked article two examples are given:
The syntactic comparative "more + adjective" can be overruled by the morphological comparative "adjective+er" for (...
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Do weak (e.g. resumptive) pronouns have Phi features or are they iAnaphor?
In the Minimalist program, would weak (resumptive) pronouns be like normal pronouns with Phi features or are they anaphors with iAnaphor?
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What is the relationship between 'Government and Binding Theory', 'Principles and Parameters', and 'Minimalism?
As I understand it, P&P and Minimalism are "programs", which are like different ways of thinking about syntax. G&B is the generative grammar that is based on P&P. (I think that's all ...
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Feature values [+/- interpretable], how these values are set?
In Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995) and in Derivation by Phase (DbP) (Chomsky, 2000, 2005, 2008), call it Phase Theory, features enter narrow syntax with predefined values, these values are binary (-...
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How often is MP taught by teaching GB first?
When a student starts learning syntax,1 how common is it to first teach them GB (or a stripped-down, GB-flavored approach), and then teach MP once they've got the hang of it?
This was obviously the ...
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Minimalism - a question about a property of merge operation
Does anyone know what would it mean that the merge operation is asymmetrical? Would this mean that the order of merged objects is important?
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Why passive light v is defective?
In Chomsky (2000,2001), the passive, along with unaccusative and other forms of participle object constructions, with the light v is considered 'defective' because as Chomsky (2001:6) says: light v of ...
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Isn't postulating Spell-Out resurrecting the old notion of Surface Structure?
The key distinction, where Spell-Out is a point in the derivation rather than a true level of representation is still rather obscure to me.
Can you explain why Spell-Out is something different, ...
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What is the difference between vPs and v*Ps?
Why do I sometimes come across a label like v* instead of v in the literature? As I understood, it is the same thing.
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AdvP Merged in Spec XP or Adjoined to XP
Radford (2011) merges AdvPs in the specifiers of the phrases that they modify. What are the advantages of such an analysis over augmented XPs (AdvP adjoined to XP)?
If I'm not mistaken, specifiers are ...
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Types of adjuncts - What can be adjoined to what and why?
In generative grammar, more specifically in GB and Minimalism, what are the possible types of adjuncts we can have and to which other categories can they be adjoined. E.g.: the man [next to him] many ...
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Copulas and theta roles
Hi I was wondering if and if so which theta roles are being discharged to the DPs/NPs in sentences such as "these are French men". Also I was asking myself what kind of structure one would give to ...
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How can merge produce grammatical strings if mathematical sets do not have an order?
Merge takes two elements and combines them into a set. Say it takes a DP "Luke" and a V "run". We can then define a VP by going merge(DP,V) = {DP,V} "Luke run". But since sets are un-ordered, {DP,V} = ...
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Does a copied syntactic object have to c-command what it was copied from?
I think this is the case but I can't find any sources saying so. Mind helping me out?
I know Internal Merge necessarily guarantees that a copied syntactic object c-commands its lower copies, but the ...
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How does the view that theta-roles are features work exactly? For example, in Hornstein 1999 Movement and Control
Hornstein 1999 says that theta-roles are features on verbs and a DP receives a theta-role by checking a theta-feature of a VP that it merges with. How would this be represented in a syntactic tree?
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What languages have been documented using Minimalism?
I'm interested in having a few references to (more of less) full grammars of natural languages that would be written under Minimalist approach. Are there any around?
I guess, accounts of some major ...
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Why is 'internal Merge' possible at all in a theory that rests on Economy and Strict Cyclicity?
In his March 2014 MIT lectures, Chomsky continues to claim that 'internal Merge', which yields the traditionally problematic 'displacement' property, is, in fact, the simplest and most economical ...
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Are Spanish "que" clauses following "parece" complements or postponed subjects?
The Spanish equivalent of It seems that they hate each other is Parece que se odian.
In both languages seem/parecer are one-place predicates (well, both can optionally accept a second argument with ...
user6814
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What empirical evidence can be produced that all syntactic structure is binary branching?
A tenet of the Minimalist Program is that all syntactic structure is binary branching. Merge always merges two constituents to a greater constituent until the greatest constituent, the sentence, is ...
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