2. Introduction
The study of syntax is the investigation of the rules, principles,
and processes which determine the structure of sentences in
human languages. Syntax can be seen as the governing principles
defining which combinations of linguistic symbols are deemed to
be correctly structured by natural language speakers.
The Minimalist Program is a set of programmatic ideas for the
creation of a theoretical framework for syntax, developed
by Noam A. Chomsky and his followers since the early 1990s.
3. The Minimalist Program
The Minimalist Program (MP) is a set of programmatic ideas
for the creation of a theoretical framework for syntax, developed
by Noam A. Chomsky and his followers since the early 1990s.
It is a further development on the theory of syntax with a goal
toward minimality. Due to this, some economy-driven principles
have been adopted to replace some other principles in
Government and Binding Theory (GB) which is more
appropriately known as Principles and Parameters Theory (PPT).
4. The Minimalist Program
The "Minimalist Program" aims at the further development of ideas involving
economy of derivation and economy of representation.
1- Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements (i.e.
transformations) only occur in order to match interpretable features with
uninterpretable features. An example of an interpretable feature is the plural
inflection on regular English nouns, e.g. dogs. The word dogs can only be used
to refer to several dogs, not a single dog, and so this inflection contributes to
meaning, making it interpretable.
2- Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures
must exist for a purpose, i.e. the structure of a sentence should be no larger or
more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality.
5. Numeration
Numeration is a Formal device used in the minimalist program.
A numeration is a set that contains pairs of;
a. the lexical items that will be used in a syntactic derivation and
b. an index that indicates how often each lexical item will be used in the derivation.
Example; (ii) is the numeration for the sentence in (i):
(i) The women built the airplanes
(ii) {<the,2>, <women,1>, <built,1>, <airplanes,1>, <T(ense),1>}
Chomsky (1995) argues that derivations using the same numeration constitute the
reference set for a derivation; these derivations are candidates for comparison with
respect to economy conditions, and only the 'cheapest' candidate, i.e. the one that
violates the least economy conditions, is grammatical.
6. The Operation Merge
Merge is one of the basic operations in the Minimalist Program, a
leading approach to generative syntax, when two syntactic objects are
combined to form a new syntactic unit (a set).
Merge also has the property of recursion in that it may apply to its own
output: the objects combined by Merge are either lexical items or sets
that were themselves formed by Merge. This recursive property of
Merge has been claimed to be a fundamental characteristic that
distinguishes language from other cognitive faculties.
As Noam Chomsky (1999) puts it, Merge is "an indispensable
operation of a recursive system ... which takes two syntactic objects A
and B and forms the new object G={A,B}“.
7. X-bar Theory
X-bar theory is a theory of syntactic category formation. It embodies two
independent claims: one, that phrases may contain intermediate constituents
projected from a head X; and two, that this system of projected constituency
may be common to more than one category (e.g., N, V, A, P, etc.).
The letter X is used to signify an arbitrary lexical category (part of speech);
when analyzing a specific utterance, specific categories are assigned. Thus,
the X may become an N for noun, a V for verb, an A for adjective, or a P
for preposition.
The term X-bar is derived from the notation representing this structure.
Certain structures are represented by X (an X with a bar over it). Because
this may be difficult to typeset, this is often written as X′, using the prime
symbol or with superscript numerals as exponents, e.g., X1. In English,
however, this is still read as "X bar".
8. X-bar Theory
Different theories of grammar assign X-bar theory
elements to phrase types in different ways. Consider the
sentence He studies linguistics at the
university. A transformational grammar theory might
parse this sentence as the diagram shows:
The "IP" is an inflectional phrase. Its specifier is the
noun phrase (NP) which acts as the subject of the
sentence. The complement of the IP is the predicate of
the sentence, a verb phrase (VP). There is no word in
the sentence which explicitly acts as the head of the
inflectional phrase, but this slot is usually considered to
contain the unspoken "present tense" implied by the
tense marker on the verb "studies".
