Free Noam Chomsky by Wolfgang B. Sperlich

affair does tend to throw some of Chomsky’s character flaws into relief’. 36
    As alluded to earlier, one key strand of Chomskyan linguistics to date is bio-linguistics. The program that implements this in detail is the so-called
Minimalist Program ( MP )
, named after the 1995 publication of the same title. While there had been earlier mentions of the term ‘minimalist’, one can begin by asking what the term is supposed to convey in relation to a linguistic program. Taking it in its literal sense one might assume that the whole theory has become ‘minimal’ in its range of application. Not so, its range is becoming wider but what is being minimized is the system of rules in favour of a few but powerful explanatory principles. What comes to the fore now is the implementation of the long considered ‘principles and parameters’ approach. While some of these ‘principles’ had been developed in
Government and Binding ( GB )
theory, there was too much of an emphasis on stipulating rule systems that define such principles. A radical new approach demanded that such principles should be stripped down to the bare bones. Take, for example, all this labelling of a tree structure (or string notation) – is it really necessary? No, it isn’t, and here comes ‘bare phrase structure’, where all we have are the syntactic objects but no more labelled constituents. If we apply the principle ‘Move a’, then all we do is to ‘Move a’ up or down unlabelled nodes. The following tree is an example of a bare tree structure of the Japanese sentence
    John-wa nani-o kaimasita ka?
(What did John buy?)
    as proposed by the Minimalist Program linguist David Adger, 37 but with the constituent labelling deleted:

    As can be seen, without delving into the technicalities, the verb
kaimasita
(to buy) gets shifted around quite a bit (indicated by round brackets), as does
John-wa
. There are two abstract (i.e. non-lexical) syntactic objects, namely T and v. Items within square brackets are features that need to be ‘checked’ – the strikethrough items indicate that this has been done successfully. An MP linguist can figure out what all the constituents are (i.e. the points where a branch meets), and in any case, since they are determined by the merged syntactic objects, there is no need to make them explicit and thus complicate the picture by inserting further categories. While for the uninitiated the tree structure derivation above is double Dutch, the figure still demonstrates the capacity of the
Minimalist Program
. It is the capacity to generate any well-formed sentence in any language, as well as being able to explain where and why an ill-formed (i.e. ungrammatical) sentence crashed in its derivation. Naturally all or most of the parameters of a given language must be known before such a derivation is contemplated, and in addition the principles applied may have to be modified to suit individual languages. The underlying skeleton, however, is provided by the
Minimalist Program
and the Universal Grammar ( UG ). The ensuing explanatory power is thus much advanced. No other current linguistic theory can make such sweeping claims. As Chomsky is always careful to say, ‘if true’, the
Minimalist Program
in combination with bio-linguistics and Universal Grammar shows the greatest promise in current linguistics research.
    The net result of Chomsky’s philosophy of language has been to wrest language away from philosophy and situate it within a natural science called linguistics. As for Chomsky the philosopher, what he has achieved in philosophical terms is to counter the claims made by Quine and other behaviourists, namely that language is learned behaviour. Chomsky’s own counter-claim, based on his scientific investigations, is that the human language capacity is innate as part of a biological system. This nativist or innate theory of language has been the touchstone of both philosophers and linguists who subscribe to radically