Is there any minimalist theory and if so what are its main
tenets? I ask this because I have recently been reading a slew of papers that
appear to treat minimalism as a theoretical “framework,” and this suggests that
there are distinctive theoretical commitments that minimalist analyses make
that render them minimalist (just as there are distinctive assumptions that
make a theory GBish, see below). What are these and what makes these
commitments “minimalist”? I ask this for it starts to address a “worry” (not
really, as I don’t worry much abut these things) that I’ve been thinking about
for a while, the distinction between a program and a theory. Here’s what I’ve
been thinking.
Minimalism debuted in 1993 as a program, in Chomsky’s
eponymous paper. There is some debate as to whether chapter 3 of the “Black
Book” (BB) was really the start of the Minimalist Program (MP) or whether there
were already substantial hints about the nature of MP earlier on (e.g. in what
became chapters 1 and 2 of BB). What is
clear is that by 1993, there existed a self-conscious
effort to identify a set of minimalist themes and to explore these in
systematic ways. These tropes divided into at least two kinds, when seen in
retrospect.[1]
First, there was the methodological motif. MP was a call to
critically re-examine the theoretical commitments of earlier theory, in
particular GB.[2] The idea was to try and concretize methodological
nostrums like “simple, elegant, natural theories are best” in the context of
then extant syntactic theory. Surprisingly (at least to me)[3],
Chomsky showed that these considerations could have a pretty sharp bite in the
context of mid 90s theory. I still consider Chomsky’s critical analysis of the
GB levels as the paradigm example of methodological minimalism. The paper shows
how conceptual considerations impose different burdens of proof wrt the different
postulated levels. Levels like PF (which interface with the sound systems (AP))
or LF (which interfaces with the belief
(CI) systems) need jump no empirical hurdles (they are “virtually conceptually
necessary”) in contrast to internal levels like DS and SS (which require
considerable empirical justification). In this instance, methodological
minimalism rests on the observation that whereas holding that grammars
interface with sound and meaning is a truism (and has been since the dawn of time),
postulating grammar internal levels is anything but. From this it trivially
follows that any theory that postulates levels analogous to DS and SS faces a
high burden of proof. This reasoning is just the linguistic version of the
anodyne observation that saying anything scientifically non-trivial requires
decent evidence. In effect, it is the observation that PF and LF are very
uninteresting levels while DS and SS are interesting indeed.
One of the marvels, IMO, of these methodological
considerations is that they led rather quickly to a total reconfiguration of UG
(eliminating DS and SS from UG is a significant theoretical step) and induced a
general suspicion of grammar internal constructs beyond the suspect levels. In
addition to DS and SS the 93 paper cast aspersions on traces (replacing them
with copies), introduced feature checking, and suggested that government was a
very artificial primitive relation whose central role in the theory of grammar
called for serious reconsideration.
These themes are more fully developed in BB’s chapter 4, but
the general argumentative outlines are similar to what we find in chapter 3.
For example, the reasoning developing Bare Phrase Structure has a very similar
structure to that concerning the elimination of DS/SS. It starts with the
observation that any theory of grammar must have a combination operation
(merge) and then goes on to outline what is the least we must assume concerning
the properties of such an operation given widely accepted facts about
linguistic structures. The minimal properties require little justification.
Departures from them do. The trick is to see how far we can get making only
anodyne assumptions (e.g. grammars interface with CI/AP, grammars involve very
simple rules of combination) and then requiring that what goes beyond the
trivial be well supported before being accepted. So far as I can see, there
should be nothing controversial in this form of argument or the burdens it
places on theory, though there has been, and continues to be, reasonable
controversy about how to apply it in particular cases.[4]
However, truth be told, methodological minimalism is better
at raising concerns than delivering theory to meet them. So, for example, a
grammar with Merge alone is pretty meager. Thus, to support standard
grammatical investigation, minimalists have added technology that supplements
the skimpy machinery that methodological minimalism motivates.
A prime example of such is the slew of locality conditions
minimalists have adopted (e.g. minimality and phase impenetrability) and the
feature inventories and procedures for checking them (Spec-X0, AGREE
via probe-goal) that have been explored. Locality conditions are tough to
motivate on methodological grounds.
Indeed, there is a good sense in which grammars that include locality
conditions of various kinds and features of various flavors licensed by
different feature checking operations are less
simple than those that eschew these. However, to be even mildly empirically
adequate any theory of grammar will need substantive locality conditions of
some kind. Minimalists have tried to motivate them on computational rather
methodological grounds. In particular, minimalists have assumed that bounding
the domain of applicable operations is a virtue in a computational system (like
a grammar) and so locality conditions of
some variety are to be expected to be part of UG. The details, however, are
very much open to discussion and require empirical justification.
Let me stress this. I have suggested above that there are
some minimalist moves that are methodological defaults (e.g. no DS/SS, copies
versus traces, some version of merge). The bulk of current minimalist
technology, however, does not fall
under this rubric. It’s chief
motivations are computational and empirical. And here is where we move from
minimalism as program to minimalism as theory. Phase theory, for example, does not enjoy the methodological privileges
of the copy theory. The latter is the minimal way of coding for the evident
existence of non-local dependencies. The former is motivated (at best) in terms
of the general virtues of local domains in a computational context and the
specific empirical virtues of phase based notions of locality. Phase Theory
moves us from the anodyne to the very interesting indeed. It moves us from
program to theory, or, more accurately, theories,
for there are many ways to realize the empirical and computational goals that
motivate phases.
Consider an example, e.g. choosing between a minimalist
theory that includes the first more local version of the phase impenetrability
condition (PIC1) or the second more expansive one (PIC2). The latter is
currently favored because it fits better with a probe-goal technology given
data like inverse nominative agreement in Icelandic quirky case clauses. But
this is hardly the only technology available and so the decision in favor of
this version of the PIC is motivated neither on general methodological nor broadly
computational ones. It really is an entirely empirical matter: how well does
the specific proposal handle the relevant data? In other words, lots of current phase theory is only
tangentially related to the larger minimalist themes that motivate the minimalist
program. And this is true for much (maybe most) of what gets currently
discussed under the rubric of minimalism.
Now, you may conclude from the above that I take this to be
a problem. I don’t. What may be problematic is that practitioners of the
minimalist art appear to me not to recognize the difference between these different
kinds of considerations. So for example, current minimalism seems to take
Phases, PIC2, AGREE under Probe-Goal, and Multiple Spell Out (MSO) as defining
features of minimalist syntax. A good chunk of current work consists in
tweaking these assumptions (which heads are phases?, is there multiple agree?,
must probes be phase heads?, are the heads relevant to AP MSO identical to CI
MSO?, etc.) in response to one or another recalcitrant data set. Despite this, there
is relatively little discussion (I know of virtually none) of how these
assumptions relate to more general minimalist themes, or indeed to any minimalist considerations. Indeed,
from where I sit, though the above are thought of as quintessentially
minimalist problems, it is completely unclear to me how (or even if) they
relate to the any of the features that originally motivated the minimalist program, be they methodological,
conceptual or computational. Lots of the technology in use today by those
working in the minimalist “framework” is different from what was standard in GB
(though lots only looks different,
phase theory, for example, being virtually isomorphic to classical subjacency
theory), but modulo the technology, the proposals having nothing distinctively
minimalist about them. This is not a criticism of the research, for there can
be lots of excellent work that is orthogonal to minimalist concerns. However,
identifying minimalist research with the particular technical questions that arise from a very specific syntactic
technology can serve to insulate current syntactic practice from precisely
those larger conceptual and methodological concerns that motivated the minimalist
program at the outset.
Let me put this another way: one of the most salutary
features of early minimalism is that it encouraged us to carefully consider our
assumptions. Very general assumptions led us to reconsider the organization of
the grammar in terms of four special levels and reject at least two and maybe
all level organized conceptions of UG. It led us to rethink the core properties
of phrase structure and the relation of phrase structure operations to
displacement rules. It lead us to appreciate the virtues of the unification of
the modules (on both methodological and Darwin’s Problem grounds) and to
replace traces (and, for some (moi), PRO) with copies. It led us to consider
treating all long distance dependencies regardless of their morphological
surface manifestations in terms of the same basic operations. These moves were
motivated by a combination of considerations. In the early days, minimalism had
a very high regard for the effort of clarifying the proferred explanatory
details. This was extremely salutary and, IMO, it has been pretty much lost. I
suspect that part of the reason for this has been the failure to distinguish
the general broad concerns of the minimalist program from the specific technical
features of different minimalist theories, thus obscuring the minimalist roots
of our theoretical constructs.[5]
Let me end on a slightly different note. Programs are not
true of false. Theories are. Our aim is to find out how FL is organized, i.e.
we want to find out the truth about
FL. MP is a step forward if it helps promote good theories. IMO, it has. But
part of minimalism’s charm has been to get us to see the variety of arguments
we can and should deploy and how to weight them. One aim is to isolate the
distinctive minimalist ideas from the
others, e.g. the more empirically motivated assumptions. To evaluate the
minimalist program we want to
investigate minimalist theories that
build on its leading ideas. One way of clarifying what is distinctively
minimalist might be by using GB as a point of comparison. Contrasting minimalist
proposals with their GBish counterparts would allow us to isolate the
distinctive features of each. In the
early days, this was standard procedure (look at BB’s Chapter 3!). Now this is
rarely done. I suggest we start re-integrating the question “what would GB say”
(WWGBS) back into our research methods (here)
so as to evaluate how and how much minimalist considerations actually drive
current theory. Here’s my hunch: much less than the widespread adoption of the
minimalist “framework” might lead you to expect.
[1]
Actually there is a third: in addition to methodological and computational
motifs there exists evolutionary considerations stemming from Darwin’s Problem.
I won’t discuss these here.
[2]
Such methodological minimalism could be applied to any theory. Not surprisingly, Chomsky’s efforts were directed at
GB, but his methodological considerations could apply to virtually any extant
approach.
[3]
A bit of confession: I originally reacted quite negatively to the 93 paper,
thinking that it could not possibly be either true or reasonable. What changed
my mind was an invitation to teach a winter course in the Netherlands on
syntactic theory during the winter of 93. I had the impression that my reaction
was the norm, so I decided to dedicate the two weeks I was teaching to
defending the nascent minimalist viewpoint. Doing this convinced me that there
was a lot more to the basic idea than I had thought. What really surprised me
is that taking the central tenets even moderately seriously led to entirely
novel ways of approaching old phenomena, including ACD constructions, multiple
interrogation/ superiority, and QR. Moreover, these alternative approaches,
though possibly incorrect were not obviously
incorrect and they were different. To discover that the minimalist point of
view could prove so fecund given what appear to be such bare bones assumptions,
still strikes me as nothing short of miraculous.
[4]
As readers may know, I have tried to deploy similar considerations in the
domains of control and binding. This has proven to be very controversial but,
IMO, not because of the argument form
deployed but due to different judgments concerning the empirical consequences.
Some find the evidence in favor of grammar internal formatives like PRO to meet
the burden of proof requirement outlined above. Some do not. That’s a fine
minimalist debate.
[5]
I further suspect that the field as a whole has tacitly come to the conclusion
that MP was actually not a very good idea, but this is a topic for another
post.
