“Minimalist Program”

By Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky was a Jewish born, American theoretical Linguist. He received a Ph.D . in
linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 after submitting one chapter of LSLT as a
doctoral dissertation (Transformational Analysis).
1.1 General Distinctive Perception
His work from the 1950s revolutionized the field of linguistics by treating language as a uniquely
human, biologically based cognitive capacity. Through his contributions to linguistics and related
fields, including cognitive psychology and the philosophies of mind and language, Chomsky
helped to initiate and sustain what came to be known as the “cognitive revolution.” On the whole
- he held that the basic principles of all languages, as well as the basic range of concepts are used
to express, are innately represented in the human mind and that language learning consists of the
unconscious construction of a grammar from these principles in accordance with cues drawn
from the child’s linguistic environment. He held that it is the discovery, through the application
of formal systems, of the innate principles that make possible the swift acquisition of language
by children and the ordinary use of language by children and adults alike. (Britannica)
1.2 Minimalist Program
The Minimalist Program was a collection of essays in a form of a book by Noam Chomsky. The
essays' purpose is to attempt to situate linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences.
The minimalist approach (generally- cutting back on elements without purpose, while building
up elements with purpose) to linguistic theory is formulated and progressively developed. Its
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
Interface
Levels

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.
(Britannica)
With this book, Chomsky built on pursuits from the earliest days of generative grammar to
formulate a new research program ("is a program, not a theory") that had far-reaching
implications for the field.
1.3 Generative Grammar
There are many different kinds of generative grammar, including transformational grammar as
developed by Noam Chomsky from the mid-1950s. Linguists have disagreed as to which, if any,
of these different kinds of generative grammar serves as the best model for the description of
natural languages.
Generative grammars do not merely distinguish the grammatical sentence of a language from
ungrammatical sequences of words of the same language; they also provide a structural
description, or syntactic analysis, for each of the grammatical sentences. The structural
descriptions provided by a generative grammar are comparable with, but more precisely
formulated than, the analysis that result from the traditional practice of parsing sentences in
terms of the parts of speech. (Britannica)
1.4 Transformational Generative Grammar
Noam Chomsky most widely discussed theory of transformational grammar (proposed in 1957).
It is a system of language analysis that recognizes the relationship among the various elements of
a sentence and among the possible sentences of a language and uses processes or rules (some of
which are called transformations) to express these relationships.
 “John read the book”
Example (active)
Transformational
grammar relates

“The book was read by John.”

(passive)

The statement “George saw Mary” is related to the corresponding questions, “Whom [or who]
did George see?” and “Who saw Mary?”
Sets such as these active and passive sentences appear to be very different on the surface ( i.e., in
such things as word order), a transformational grammar tries to show that in the “underlying
structure” (i.e., in their deeper relations to one another), the sentences are very similar.
Transformational grammar assigns a “deep structure” and a “surface structure” to show the
relationship of such sentences.
Thus, “I know a man who flies planes” can be considered the surface form of a deep structure
approximately like “I know a man. The man flies’ airplanes.” The notion of deep structure can be
especially helpful in explaining ambiguous utterances; e.g., “Flying airplanes can be dangerous”
may have a deep structure, or meaning, like “Airplanes can be dangerous when they fly” or “To
fly airplanes can be dangerous.
1.5 Aims
It aims to eliminate from linguistic theory anything which is not 'virtually necessary'. For
instance, in Chomsky (1992) it is claimed that d-structure and s-structure can be dispensed with
(stop using it).

Given that language consists of expressions which are pairs of PF- and LF-representations, the
following elements are assumed to be necessarily provided by Universal Grammar:

a set of (phonological, semantic, and grammatical) features

a procedure to assemble features into lexical items
a small set of operations that form syntactic objects: the computational system of human
language CHL.

The central thesis of the minimalist framework is that CHL is the optimal, simplest, solution to
legibility conditions at the PF- and LF-interface; the goal is to explain observed properties of
language in terms of these legibility conditions, and of properties of CHL.

1.6 Other Critics’ Viewpoints with respect to Noam Chomsky

His work of transformational grammar contradicted earlier tenets of structuralism by rejecting

the notion that every language is unique.
Two versions of transformational grammar were put forward in the mid-1950s, the first by Zellig
S. Harris and the second by Noam Chomsky, his pupil. It can be seen partly as a reaction against
post-Bloomfieldian structuralism and partly as a continuation of it.
What Chomsky reacted against most strongly was the post-Bloomfieldian concern with
discovery procedures. In his opinion, linguistics should set itself the more modest and more
realistic goal of formulating criteria for evaluating alternative descriptions of a language without
regard to the question of how these descriptions had been arrived at; and this theory should be
formalized in terms of modern mathematical notions.
He had adopted what he called a “mentalistic” theory of language, by which term he implied that
the linguist should be concerned with the speaker’s creative linguistic competence and not his
performance, the actual utterances produced.
He had challenged:
a) The post-Bloomfieldian concept of the phoneme, which many scholars regarded as the
most solid and enduring result of the previous generation’s work.
b) The structuralists’ insistence upon the uniqueness of every language, claiming instead
that all languages were, to a considerable degree, cut to the same pattern—they shared a
certain number of formal and substantive universals.
In Syntactic Structures (1957), comprised three sections, or components:
 The phrase-structure component
 The transformational component
 The morphophonemic component.
Each of these components consisted of a set of rules operating upon a certain “input” to yield a
certain “output.”
On a general note, Chomsky argued that language is incited by social context and discourse
context but essentially uncaused—enabled by a distinct set of innate principles but innovative, or
“creative.” It is for this reason that he believed that it is unlikely that there will ever be a full-
fledged science of linguistic behaviour. As in the view of the 17th-century French philosopher
Rene Descartes, according to Chomsky, the use of language is due to a “creative principle,” not a
causal one.
On the contrary, Goodman assumed that the mind at birth is largely a tabula rasa (blank slate)
and that language learning in children is essentially a conditioned response to linguistic stimuli.
In simple words, he believed that linguistic behaviour is regular and caused (in the sense of being
a specific response to specific stimuli.
Whereas, Harris thought of the study of language as the taxonomic classification of “data,” He
ignored Chomsky’s work, and Goodman—when he realized that Chomsky would not accept his
behaviourism—denounced it. Their reactions, with some variations, were shared by a large
majority of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists.

1.7 “Minimalist Program” - Form & Formalism in Linguistics by James

McElvenny

Since 1950s, generative linguistics has become a dominant paradigm, with many connections to
both the formal and natural sciences. Yet despite these aforementioned formal beginnings, the
generative theory of linguistics has changed its commitments quite drastically over the
intervening years, eschewing among other things formalization, cognitive science for
evolutionary biology, derivations for constraints, rules for schemata, phrase structure for cyclic
phases of the merge operation and other
theoretical choices. A related, more ontological, question is, if the grammars of linguistics are
scientific theories (as Chomsky and others have insisted over the years), then what are the
objects being explained by these grammars?
Linguistics, too, has seen its fair share of radical shifts in theory and perspective over the past
few decades. In fact, the early generative tradition of Chomsky
(1957) had a more formal mathematical outlook. Linguistics approached language from a more
syntactic perspective. This was due in part to two assumptions, namely (1) that syntax is
autonomous from semantics, phonology etc. and that syntax or the form of language is more
amenable, than say semantic meaning, to precise mathematical elucidation. However, it must be
added that as early as Syntactic Structures had often been advanced as a necessary condition for
progress in semantics. Mathematical models of this sort would be a key tool in early generative
linguistic analysis. Chomsky states the formal position in the following way at the time:
Precisely constructed models for linguistic structure can play an important role, both positive and
negative, in the process of discovery itself. By pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to
an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and,
consequently, gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic data. More positively, a formalized
theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was
explicitly designed. (Chomsky 1957: 5)
He goes on to chastise linguists who are sceptical of formal methods. However, as we shall see,
the course of linguistic theory saw a decrease in formalization and an increased resistance to it
(partly inspired by Chomsky’s later views). In fact, a generative grammar in the early stages was
expressly noncommittal on ontological questions: “Each such grammar is simply a description of
a certain set of utterances, namely, those which it generates” (Chomsky 1957: 48).
By the 1960s, grammars were reconceived as tools for revealing linguistic competence or the
idealized mental states of language users. With mentalism, linguistics looked towards sciences
such as psychology, physics, and biology for methodological guidance as opposed to logic and
mathematics as it did before.
As Cowie (1999: 167) states of the time after Aspects, Chomsky “seemed also to have found a
new methodology for the psychological study of language and created a new job description for
linguists”. The psychological interpretation of linguistic theory held sway until the 1990s, when
the bio linguistic program emerged as yet another new way of theorizing about language. The
Minimalist Program (1995b) pushed the field towards understanding language as a “natural
object”, in which questions of its optimal design and evolution take centre-stage.