Understanding Minimalism

 

This course will introduce the students to the Minimalist Program, based on the textbook of the same title by Hornstein, Nunes & Grohmann (CUP, 2005). The purpose is to understand what's behind linguistic minimalism with respect to both earlier frameworks (especially Government-and-Binding Theory) and developments within the minimalist research agenda (for example, Chomsky 1995 vs. 2000). After a brief frame-setting concentrating on the architecture of the grammar, interpretive interfaces, and biolinguistic concerns, each class will tackle specific topics along the structure of the book: Theta Domains, Case Domains, Movement and Minimality Effects, Phrase Structure, Linearization, Binding Theory, Feature Interpretability and Feature Checking, and Derivational Economy. The material will be enriched with developments of the past few years, in particular on a classification of different approaches in terms of architectural concerns vis-à-vis the role of the interfaces in conjunction with the narrow syntactic derivation.