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The minimalist program seems to be very fashionable amongst linguists at present, but for the life of me I can't understand its appeal.

As far as I can see - and I've read my fair share of the literature by now - there is little minimalist about minimalist grammars. In fact, they seem to overcomplicate things, as they require so much metadata about grammatical constituents and moving and merging operations that one can hardly render an example sentence longer than a couple of words on a single page.

Why define grammars that require these operations in the first place? Why not stick to simple CFGs or CSGs with rewrite rules that generate precisely the same strings?

What am I missing? Is there a sensible reason for the existence of these lumbering structures?

player.mdl
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    "...one can hardly render an example sentence longer than a couple of words on a single page." - I think you're confusing notational simplicitly for theoretical parsimony. They're not the same thing. Another small point: Move and merge collapse down into a single operation. Additionally, CFGs aren't powerful enough to capture natural languages. That much is pretty uncontroversial at this point. See the work on cross-serial dependencies in Germanic. – P Elliott Mar 21 '14 at 00:24
  • ...and to my knowledge nobody would take seriously the idea that natural languages should be analysed using CSGs! The recognition problem for CSGs can be shown to be only solvable in polynominal time, never mind parsing the damn things. CSGs are way too powerful for the task at hand. Current grammar formalisms have converged on the class of mildly context sensitive grammars, which e.g. the minimalist grammars of Ed Stabler fall into, as does HPSG + others. – P Elliott Mar 21 '14 at 00:28
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    This will be controversial, but my take is that Chomskyan transformational grammar in its various incarnations is now at a stage of development similar to medieval scholasticism or late Ptolemaic astronomy. It's still the dominant paradigm for historical reasons (in this case, the Chomskyan revolution of the '50s and '60s), but has outlived its usefulness and is struggling increasingly desperately to "save the phenomena", hence all the complicated machinery you describe. The reasons for its dominance are mainly institutional, namely that the large majority of tenured syntax professors these da – TKR Mar 20 '14 at 02:10
  • That's kind of what I was suspecting... – player.mdl Mar 20 '14 at 11:58
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    it might be added that at the height of the Chomskyan revolution (as some call it), US universities were undergoing a general expansion and various new linguistics departments were opened. the new programs were staffed by recent graduates, many trained at MIT or other pro-Chomskyan programs. Still to this day (with the immense difficulty for a graduating PhD to land a tenure-track job), an MIT degree in linguistics (as in other fields) has cachet. –  Mar 21 '14 at 00:18
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    Plus, since there's a new "program" every few years (rather like a new version of Windows), when hiring time comes up you'll need somebody who's au courant with the latest stuff, cause the folks already there don't really get it. – jlawler Mar 23 '14 at 18:08
  • @TKR kindly repost your original answer? I believe it is the most sensible one I've encountered thus far, but it seems to have vanished. – player.mdl Mar 24 '14 at 22:41
  • @player.mdl It appears to have been changed into a comment: see above. – TKR Mar 25 '14 at 17:16
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    @TKR Can you come to this question and explain why you think your answer is valid? I'd like to know why you think your answer should be undeleted (we can do that if necessary). You can do this by posting another answer to that question in the link. Thank you. – Alenanno Mar 26 '14 at 09:28

6 Answers6

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The first thing to point out is that the Minimalist Program is a Program not a theory (the clue is in the name), following the distinction made by Lakatos. It can be thought of as an injunction to minimise the contents of UG, i.e. to minimise the the amount of linguistic-specific information we invoke in explaining natural language. The copy theory of movement, for example, is minimalist in the sense that it is ontologically more parsimonious than preceding theories, in which traces were posited as distinct linguistic objects. According to the copy theory of movement, a trace just is the moved element. Theories are only minimalist to the extent that they attempt to minimise the contents of UG.

Context Sensitive Grammars are highly unsuitable for analysing natural language, for reasons i've laid out in my initial comments. To reiterate, if we're at all interested in modelling the linguistic competence of an actual speaker, they're completely unrealistic as even just the recognition problem takes polynomial time to complete. Context Free Grammars have been shown not to be powerful enough to model natural language - see the answer to this question, for example: Could anyone give examples of context-sensitive sentences that cannot be generated by context-free rules?.

Exactly the same criticisms you level against minimalist approaches could be levelled against alternative frameworks, such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, or Combinatory Categorial Grammar. Both involve a high degree of notational complexity, but notational complexity isn't the same thing as theoretical parsimony. One would never think to criticise a physicist for the length of his formulae. Given that natural language is such a complex phenomenon with countless intricacies, it requires sufficiently fine-grained machinery to account for. I don't believe that minimalist accounts are the only or even the best way to think about syntactic phenomenon, but to dismiss them out of hand because of their apparent notational complexity is a mistake.

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P Elliott
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    your answer contains many words, but not much content. Minimalism in its current state (as presented for instance in the textbooks of Radford and Carnie) is anything but minimalistic -- numerous functional categories and projections for which there is little emperical motivation. Angels on pinheads, to use Jlawler's terminology. Most instantiations of HPSG are closer to what can be emprically verified, although I agree that the AVMs are often overly complex. Dependency grammars, in contrast, are truly minimalistic. I'll be happy to elaborate on that statement if you're interested. – Tim Osborne Mar 22 '14 at 01:06
  • Please do? I am :) – player.mdl Mar 22 '14 at 12:02
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    @TimOsborne if you read my answer more carefully, you'll note that i don't commit to any particular theory being minimalist in the sense that i take it, aside from one brief remark comparing copy theory to trace theory. Lots of what is referred to as 'minimalist' isn't minimalist in the sense intended by Chomsky. There's nothing inherently minimalist about spec-head agreement, for example. I'm not sure what it is exactly you're objecting to. Presumably not to my explanation for why CFGs and CSGs aren't suitable formalisms. – P Elliott Mar 22 '14 at 12:39
  • @player.mdl, Dependency grammars are minimal in a basic sense. The number of nodes in the syntactic tree cannot outnumber of the number of elements (e.g. words) in the sentence at hand. Take a look at the contrasting tree structures in Wikipedia in this regard, e.g. here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar or here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrase_structure_grammar. – Tim Osborne Mar 22 '14 at 19:29
  • @player.mdl, Or provide an email address and I will send you the following journal article, which develops the argument in some detail: Osborne, Timothy, Michael Putnam, and Thomas Groß 2011. Bare phrase structure, label-less trees, and specifier-less syntax: Is Minimalism becoming a dependency grammar? The Linguistic Review 28: 315-364. – Tim Osborne Mar 22 '14 at 19:31
  • @PElliot, I am objecting to any stance that seemingly defends the Minimalist Program in its state as one currently finds it represented (again, in standard textbooks). There is nothing minimalist about these standard instantiations of the theory. The way of attempting to respond to the objection of overcomplexity is to do just what your answer has done. One appeals to the fact that the the MP is a "program", instead of a hard theory. In other words, one immediately gets abstract to divert the criticism. It's the same sort of way out as the performance vs.competence distinction. Get abstract. – Tim Osborne Mar 22 '14 at 19:43
  • How does one proceed when the contents of UG have been minimized to zero? – jlawler Mar 23 '14 at 00:13
  • @Jlawler, I don't understand your question. Is it directed at my comment? If so, please elaborate. – Tim Osborne Mar 23 '14 at 02:06
  • @TimOsborne That's a totally reasonable objection, and not a stance i adopt - in fact i very much agree with you that much of what is called 'minimalism' isn't actually minimalist in spirit. My answer was merely intended as a response to what the 'minimalist' part of 'minimalist program' is supposed to mean, and i consider it to be a more useful answer than yet another polemic against the Chomskyan paradigm. There are plenty of those to go around. – P Elliott Mar 23 '14 at 15:57
  • @PElliott, OK, but you seem to now be distancing yourself from your answer. My interpretation of your answer is that it attempts to divert the criticism by turning it around and directing the same objection at other frameworks. My reaction to your answer is also based on your record here. Of those who are likely to present Chomskyan views, that would be you. I think the polemics against Chomskyan syntax need to continue until its influence is reduced down to a proper measure. More space is needed in academia for theories of language that build on actual empericism. – Tim Osborne Mar 23 '14 at 17:58
  • What I meant is that if one is not burdened with a belief in UG -- as many of us aren't, and as I never have been -- what's the point? – jlawler Mar 23 '14 at 18:05
  • @TimOsborne I haven't said anything in my comments incompatible with my answer - i can be fully on board with the spirit of the minimalist program without tacitly endorsing particular theories which label themselves as minimalist. Rather than diverting the criticism, my intent was merely to show that criticism on the basis of notational complexity is no real criticism at all. I don't see linguistics SE as the ideal place for anti-Chomskyan polemics tbh. – P Elliott Mar 23 '14 at 18:10
  • @jlawler Reducing UG down to zero would be ideal, but it's pretty hard to give a domain-general explanation for linguistic phenomena, right? – P Elliott Mar 23 '14 at 18:11
  • It not only would be ideal, it's the null hypothesis. People talk languages and they have recognizable patterns, like everything else natural. There is no evidence for UG, and plenty of evidence against; and frankly it's always been a little too close to Creationism for my taste. – jlawler Mar 23 '14 at 18:50
  • @PElliot, In my view, any forum that accommodates debate about linguistics is a good place for anti-Chomskyan polemics. – Tim Osborne Mar 23 '14 at 19:06
  • @PElliot, my strong reaction here is due to my empathy with the original question. When I first took official syntax courses (over fifteen years ago), I was of course confronted with the dominance of the Chomskyan paradigm. My reaction was the same as that expressed in player.mdl's question. I thought: "Syntax cannot be this complex; this stuff is ridiculous". When I expressed this sentiment, the reaction from the instructor was of course negative, for my reaction was not supporting the syntax powers that be. – Tim Osborne Mar 23 '14 at 19:12
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    @PElliot, aspiring linguists who have a similar reaction to mine and player.mdl's need to know (at every opportunity) that their reaction is legitimate. The influence of Chomskyan paradigm is due much more to politics than to good science. – Tim Osborne Mar 23 '14 at 19:16
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There seems to be at least two quite distinct questions there: what is minimalist about the minimalist program? and Is there a sensible reason for the existence of the lumbering structures it deals with? P.Elliott and curiousdannii already provided general and historic answers to the first question, but I wish to supplement their answers with a more specific analysis of the framework of a typical argument within minimalism as it is usually practiced.

What is minimal?

What a typical minimal analysis will strive for is an explanation of syntactic phenomena relying solely on the following list of possible mechanisms.

  1. Bare syntactic structures constructed by the binary operation Merge (yielding only binary trees) usually with only left-adjunction by opposition to much flatter structure.

  2. The only other operation allowed is Agree, which operates blindly on a small finite set of features all having only positive or negative polarity by opposition to e.g a rich lexicon.

  3. Agree and Merge are only possible under stringent locality conditions.

  4. The geometric and feature characteristic of nodes of the trees should be mapped as cross-linguistically severely as possible with interpretive properties.

  5. As far as possible, the only further conditions put on the system should derive from core computational requirements (for instance two undistinguishable nodes of the tree, in the sense of say graph theory, or two identical set of features should be undistinguishable by the system; I also lump in this interface conditions).

This list can be deemed minimal because it is a negative list: it restricts the kind of explanation you are allowed to put forth. Especially, if one takes seriously point 4. and 5., it follows that the analysis of any construction in any given language (say left-dislocation in Spoken French) has to proceed through universal explanations in terms of geometry of the tree and feature properties, explanations which in turn possibly (and do, if the work is to have any value) imply predictions bearing on another totally different constructions (say wh-questions in Spoken French) or a similar construction in a totally different language (say left-dislocation in Japanese). For examples of what I consider good work done in this way, I would cite this or this.

Where do the lumbering structures come from and why they are actually empirical success stories for minimalism?

Now moving on to the justification of the lumbering structures. As Kayne first noted (as far as I know), the combination of point 1. and point 5. above implies the existence of many extremely refined functional projections (if only because a binary tree has a lot of internal nodes compared to the number of its leaves). So it is not that these functional projections were introduced, they were predicted to exist because they were essentially the only solution compatible with the imposed restrictions. This is indeed extremely reminiscent of the epicycles of Ptolemy and extremely worrying: if your theoretical framework leads you to postulate many things nobody has seen, shouldn't you be concerned? That's a very fair criticism but one which actually highlights the predictive power of the core principles above: if our prediction is correct, the functional projection posited (again as the only possible solution within the framework) have to be phonetically overtly present at precisely the assumed position in at least one language. The fact that this has been repeatedly shown to be true is one of the main scientific achievements of minimalism: any serious alternative account should face the challenge head-on and achieve similar predictive power within its own system. A prime example of such a successful prediction is successive cyclic movement (the point of departure between what became minimalism and many other formalization of generative grammar) which is phonetically realized (among may others) in Afrikaans and in cyclic agreement in Chamorro but one can also think about focal projection (realized in Vata) or voice projection (arguably realized in Japanese and Kiswahili). There are of course many more sophisticated ones, from binding theory, the structure of DPs, the properties of nominalizations, the logical interpretation of indefinite objects, the extraction properties of relative clauses... It thus seems to me that the comparison with angels on pinheads is quite unfair: these angels have been repeatedly found ex post on precisely the pinheads they were supposed to be dancing on.

What is the appeal?

To me, as a complete outsider to the field who has never taken a class in linguistics nor ever intend to (so I feel quite immune to any political influence this or that strand of linguistics might have on the curriculum or, a fortiori, on the hiring process), the appeal to this approach mostly stems from its cross-linguistic potential: as mentioned above, by nature, explanations valid in one language will make predictions and suggest insights for others. While it is quite easy to give a formal description of any specific linguistic phenomenon for a given language (any texas sharpshooter can do this), it seems to me that when it comes to the study of cross-linguistic correlations, minimalism is currently the only game in town. That said, I do think that the comparison with the Ptolemaic system is not off the mark: minimalism might currently be the most precise and clearest unified account we have of syntactic phenomena (just as Ptolemy's system, as famously argued by Otto Neugebauer, endured because of the clarity of its tenets and its very reasonable empirical basis) but it seems fair to me to say that linguistics is still awaiting its Kepler, not to speak of its Newton.

Olivier
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  • A long answer with a lot of big words. Where is the empericism claimed in this answer? For instance, where is the empericism behind the claim that all syntactic structures are binary? What evidence is there that I can understand that a sentence such as "Fred gave Susan flowers" contains binary branching only? That would probably mean that "Susan flowers" is a constituent? What empericism can be produced showing that "Susan flowers" is a constituent? Let's get concrete here. – Tim Osborne Mar 24 '14 at 15:42
  • Where is the empiricism that backs the foundational assumption of the MP that syntactic structures are generated bottom up? We cannot see, hear, or measure Merge (as it generates structures bottom up) in any way that I am aware of? Where is the empricism in that model of syntax? – Tim Osborne Mar 24 '14 at 15:49
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    @TimOsborne Ask your questions on linguistics.SE and it will be my pleasure to get concrete. I will note, though, that you seem to be asking me to substantiate claims that I never made. For instance, I did not write that there was an empirical basis behind binary branching, I wrote that restricting oneself to binary branching was reasonably characterized as minimal, that it entailed the existence of many functional projections and that this kind of prediction turned out to be correct. Not the same thing at all. – Olivier Mar 24 '14 at 16:05
  • your comment confirms my associations with bad science. I ask for empericism backing the putative science, and I get a vague claim that it "turned out to be correct". I don't believe it is correct. For me to believe it to be correct, I need concrete empericism. Send me an email: tjo3ya@yahoo.com. I'll be happy to consider your claims about emperical validity for the theory. – Tim Osborne Mar 24 '14 at 17:07
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    @TimOsborne what is it exactly that you take to be the scientific method? Binary branching is a hypothesis which we inspect the world (i.e. the actual linguistic data) relative to. We evaluate hypotheses on a number of grounds, including how well they fit the world, how restrictive they are, and on their elegance. The model (e.g. binary branching) isn't in the data, as you seem to suppose -- we develop a model and then see how well it fits the data. That's how basic science works. – P Elliott Mar 24 '14 at 18:00
  • @TimOsborne I ask for empiricism backing the putative science Again, ask your questions (via e-mail if you want), and I will be glad to answer them (to the best of my undoubtedly limited abilities). – Olivier Mar 24 '14 at 19:54
  • In the generative traditional all syntax is imaginary - these are models for organising the rules of a language's syntax, but no one thinks the brain actually uses their model. Minimalism may make some unusual choices in its model's design, but other theories are no less imaginary. – curiousdannii Mar 24 '14 at 21:10
  • @PElliott, I agree with your last comment. What I am hoping I can get from your side of this debate is an evaluation of the MPs hypothesis that all branching is binary. I again ask you to produce some evidence backing that stance. I have now produced evidence that it is not, yet I cannot get anything from your side supporting the hypothesis. – Tim Osborne Mar 24 '14 at 22:40
  • @Curiousdannii, I disagree with your statement. Some theories are closer to what can be verified based on emperical considerations. Those theories are the better ones. – Tim Osborne Mar 24 '14 at 22:41
  • @Olivier, I have now posted a new question asking for the evidence supporting the MP's hypothesis that all syntactic structures are binary branching. I await your answer. – Tim Osborne Mar 24 '14 at 23:02
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This will be controversial, but it might help you understand its appeal.

My take is that Chomskyan transformational grammar in its various incarnations is now at a stage of development similar to medieval scholasticism or late Ptolemaic astronomy. It's still the dominant paradigm for historical reasons (in this case, the Chomskyan revolution of the '50s and '60s), but has outlived its usefulness and is struggling increasingly desperately to "save the phenomena", hence all the complicated machinery you describe. The reasons for its dominance are mainly institutional, namely that the large majority of tenured syntax professors these days were trained as Chomskyanists, so that there are many more jobs, conference panels, etc., for linguists working in this model.

Damian Yerrick
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TKR
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  • That's kind of what I was suspecting... – player.mdl Mar 20 '14 at 11:58
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    it might be added that at the height of the Chomskyan revolution (as some call it), US universities were undergoing a general expansion and various new linguistics departments were opened. the new programs were staffed by recent graduates, many trained at MIT or other pro-Chomskyan programs. Still to this day (with the immense difficulty for a graduating PhD to land a tenure-track job), an MIT degree in linguistics (as in other fields) has cachet. –  Mar 21 '14 at 00:18
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    Plus, since there's a new "program" every few years (rather like a new version of Windows), when hiring time comes up you'll need somebody who's au courant with the latest stuff, cause the folks already there don't really get it. – jlawler Mar 23 '14 at 18:08
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    Why is this upvoted and accepted? It doesn't even answer the question. – curiousdannii Mar 24 '14 at 02:04
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    @curiousdannii Well, in fairness, it does offer an answer to the question Why define grammars that require these operations in the first place?. On the other hand, the offer answered implies that the field of linguistics is completely intellectually corrupt; an assertion that is not obviously false but which is obviously extraordinary, and extraordinary claims require... well, you know. In that particular case, no evidence at all is presented so... – Olivier Mar 24 '14 at 09:06
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    Can this be edited? I genuinely can't see how it answers either what is minimal about minimalism or why there are so many structures. The question is not asking why it's popular! – curiousdannii Mar 30 '14 at 04:23
  • @curiiousdannii I take the OP to be asking not just why minimalism is called that, but why it's so fashionable in linguistics at present ("for the life of me I can't understand its appeal") - my answer is aimed at that part of the question. – TKR Mar 30 '14 at 16:36
  • @Oliver the offer answered implies that the field of linguistics is completely intellectually corrupt -- not at all, this kind of historical/institutional reason is often a large part of the dominance of specific paradigms in any field. – TKR Mar 30 '14 at 16:40
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    @TKR It's still the dominant paradigm [...] but has outlived its usefulness and is struggling increasingly desperately [...], hence all the complicated machinery suggests it would be easy to pick 5 highly-cited articles in minimalist syntax published in top journals and to demolish them. In my field, anyone doing this would instantly reach superstardom. As I don't see that this is happening in linguistics, either I have misunderstood you or such a publication would be rejected for political reasons in linguistics (i.e the field is intellectually corrupt) or something else is going on. – Olivier Mar 31 '14 at 00:20
  • @Olivier Paradigm shifts don't happen that easily. A construction grammarian might well feel he has "demolished" the claims of a transformational syntactician, and vice versa, but lacking a basic shared framework of assumptions, neither is likely to convince the other; but it's not because one or the other is intellectually corrupt. There's lots of syntax work published in other frameworks than the Chomskyan one, though it's still in a minority, I believe largely because of the historical reasons I described. There's nothing particularly extraordinary about this situation. – TKR Mar 31 '14 at 02:20
  • @TKR is this your essential argument: proponents of minimalism have made their theories excessively complex in order to astound and awe people into thinking there's something of value underneath it all, when really it's just an attempt to remain popular? – curiousdannii Mar 31 '14 at 03:02
  • @curiousdannii No, of course not. There's no dishonesty involved. The theoretical contortions are necessitated by the assumptions of the model. – TKR Mar 31 '14 at 03:29
  • Okay. I'm just trying to understand what you're saying, so that I can suggest an edit. How about this: the proponents of minimalism are driven by a desire to have a theory that models every language, which combined with assumptions X, Y and Z means that the theory must be needlessly complex. If that's on the right track, what are the assumptions? – curiousdannii Mar 31 '14 at 03:35
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    @TKR To me, there is a world of difference between A construction grammarian might well feel he has "demolished" the claims of a transformational syntactician and [minimalism] has outlived its usefulness and is struggling increasingly desperately to "save the phenomena". The former, with the accompanying institutional analysis of why the feeling does not necessarily translate into academic prestige, is an interesting comment on the status of linguistics; the latter remains an extraordinary assertion. I wish you would consider editing your answer (e.g along the lines of curiousdannii). – Olivier Mar 31 '14 at 13:24
  • @TKR I'd still like feedback on my last comment there so that I can suggest an edit. I want to help this actually answer the question. – curiousdannii Jul 23 '15 at 00:43
  • @TKR I'm still waiting - this answer still does not address the question at all. Help me help you improve it so that it does. – curiousdannii Mar 31 '16 at 15:27
  • @curiousdannii I think other answers, such as Olivier's, do a good job of addressing your question of what the basic assumptions of minimalism are. What with the amount of discussion and variety of answers already posted I'm inclined to say the OP's question has been pretty well addressed and to leave things there. – TKR Mar 31 '16 at 17:22
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The Minimalist Program has to be compared to previous models in the generative approach to Grammar.

Government and Binding was an earlier theory developed by Chomsky which had several sub-theories such as Case Theory for assigning cases to nominals, Binding Theory to deal with anaphors, Control Theory to deal with implied nominals, Bounding Theory to deal with wh-movement, and I'm sure there are more. They were treated somewhat independently, and each had various rules and exceptions.

The Minimalist Program proposed that there was a single model of syntax which could replace all of those earlier theories. Morphemes are assigned to syntactic nodes through generic rules that aren't limited to a particular area of grammar. Rather than needing detailed and exception-ridden rules, morphemes are placed and moved as short a distance as possible. In order to do this a lot more syntactic structures are proposed, often each expressing a single semantic feature. The idea is that each morpheme will absorb a lot of syntactic structures in a predictable way.

So the minimalism isn't refering to the syntactic structures (which are rather the opposite of minimalistic), but how morphemes are assigned to those. As all theories do it has pros and cons. I'd certainly prefer it to Government and Binding, but I'd prefer Distributed Morphology or possibly even a non-generative approach to the Minimalist Program.

curiousdannii
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  • @player.mdl thank you for accepting my answer, but I think Olivier's is much better. – curiousdannii Mar 27 '14 at 08:33
  • "The Minimalist Program has to be compared to previous models in the generative approach to Grammar.

    Government and Binding was an earlier theory developed by Chomsky which had several sub-theories such as Case Theory for assigning cases to nominals, Binding Theory to deal with anaphors, Control Theory to deal with implied nominals, Bounding Theory.......

    The Minimalist Program proposed that there was a single model of syntax which could replace all of those earlier theories. ",Chomsky may not agree with what you say, let me give an answer

     – XL _At_Here_There Nov 10 '14 at 05:17
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“Take any theory of language you like, you may or may not be interested in the questions raised in the minimalist program: why does the theory have these principles, not others. If you are interested, you are pursuing the minimalist program. MP is just normal biology, which proceeds from trying to discover what are the mechanisms of development and evolution to the further "why" question: why these, not others. This deeper inquiry -- which, incidentally, goes back to Turing's work on morphogenesis, on physical principles in development and eviolution, which he took to be the true science of biology -- seeks to determine what I've called "third factor" principles, such as computational efficiency. That's MP. It's analogous to what's called the "evo-devo revolution" in biology in the past 20 years or so.”

This is what Chomsky explains what the MP means.

XL _At_Here_There
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I agree with some critics who think Minimalism is an awful theory, if it's even a theory at all. But I have a different diagnosis than some of what went wrong. We're looking at another incarnation of the long fight between Empiricism and Rationalism, or, that is, between the search for truth and the search for meaning. Chomsky is a rationalist, and looking for the truth seems to him useless if you can't find sense as well. So we wind up with a theory that tries and tries to make sense (opinions, of course, differ whether it does actually make any sense), but which apparently has no claim at all on the truth.

If only Transformational Grammar had worked, our East Coast brethren wouldn't have gotten into this pickle. The notion that parts of expressions get moved around to make them easier to express (this is roughly McCawley's version of TG) makes perfect sense, to me: transformations mediate between thought and physiology. It makes syntax much like phonology. If it were true, both the empiricists and the rationalists would be pleased and could be happy together, with only an occasional squabble.

But alas. It's not true. Things don't move around. This creates some tension among the theoretically minded. To make sense of things in face of the facts, or lack thereof, some have drifted off into a methodological heaven where the truth is discounted. Others retreat to descriptivism, or maybe just stay confused.

My own view is that giving up on context free grammar was premature.

Greg Lee
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    This isn't a place to put any and all criticisms of Minimalism, it's a specific question about which actually is "minimalistic" in Minimalism. You haven't answered that question at all. – curiousdannii Jul 23 '15 at 00:42