The Minimalist Program

The chapters that follow are based in large part on regular lecture-seminars at

MIT from 1986 through 1994. These have been continuing now for over 30

years, with broad participation by students, faculty, and others, from various

institutions and disciplines. In these introductory remarks I will outline some

of the background for the material that follows.

This work is motivated by two related questions: (1) what are the general

conditions that the human language faculty should be expected to satisfy? and

(2) to what extent is the language faculty determined by these conditions,

without special structure that lies beyond them? The first question in turn has

two aspects: what conditions are imposed on the language faculty by virtue

of (A) its place within the array of cognitive systems of the mind/brain, and

(B) general considerations of conceptual naturalness that have some independent

plausibility, namely, simplicity, economy, symmetry, nonredundancy, and

the like?