A Companion to Chomsky. Группа авторов
The above picture demonstrates the division of the language module into distinct submodules. In addition, it is assumed that the language faculty is a module of the mind distinct from other modules such as for instance the visual system. Chomsky's notion of modularity is very different from Fodorian modules (Chomsky 2018 compares his position to Fodor). For Fodor, human cognition consists of a “central system” and a number of “input systems” (Fodor 1983). The Fodorian modules are cognitive “reflexes” – specialized for particular domains, which operate fast and mandatorily, are hard‐wired for a particular area of the brain, their structure and function largely innately determined, and they are informationally encapsulated. Fodor's view on language is that it is an (i) input system analogous to those devoted to the senses, (ii) the central system, however, is unstructured and uninvestigable.8 By contrast, Chomsky assumes that language is a central system used in both input and output (in expressing and communicating thoughts), and there are probably several such central systems: a language faculty; a number “sense,” and possibly others (see e.g. Fodor 2000, Smith and Allott 2016, and Chomsky 2018 on similarities and differences between their views).
While the framework of GB led to very rich empirical generalizations and discoveries (see also the chapters by Baker, Müller, Sheehan, Chapters 10–12, in this volume), there are some issues with its architecture. In particular the proliferation of internal modules and the fact that it postulates four levels of representation can be seen as violating the principle that one should only postulate the “barest essentials” necessary for a theory of grammar. In addition, a new question on the agenda became how to account for the biological or evolutionary origin of language: To what extent is our theory of human language compatible with what we know about language evolution and the biological scaffolding of language? We turn to a discussion of these issues in the next section.
3.5 The Minimalist Program: Untying the Descriptive vs. Explanatory Knot
As the principles of GB were increasingly refined, the theory also became more complex. In lectures towards the end of the 1980s, Chomsky started asking whether the theoretical model could be rationalized in the sense of unifying, including eliminating, principles while maintaining, or possibly improving, empirical coverage (cf. Chomsky 2000, p. 93; Freidin and Vergnaud 2001, p. 642). This became the beginning of the Minimalist Program. Chomsky (1993) is the first paper that is written from an explicit Minimalist perspective and one of the cases discussed there provides a helpful illustration of the underlying logic. Example (18) deals with case, which is not very conspicuous in English, but which can be seen in pronouns.
1 (18)Sara/John likes him/her.She/he likes him/her.Sara proved [him right]
As (18a) and (18b) show, pronoun subjects occur in nominative case and pronoun objects occur in accusative case, which of course are relics of the full‐fledged morphological case system in older varieties of English. (18c) shows that accusative case can also occur in other environments. This raises the interesting question of how case assignment works – what are the configurations in which case licensing occurs?9 In GB, the structural representations underlying the bolded items in (18) are all different, though attempts had been made to use one principle (government) to account for all of them (Uriageka 1988, 2012). Before we can consider the argument, we need to do a brief detour to introduce some core concepts of phrase structure (see section 3.6.2 below, and Lasnik and Lohndal 2013 for a much more detailed treatment, including the historical development of phrase structure within generative grammar).
Consider the simplified structure in (19), where we are not illustrating the inner structure of the nominal phrase (called DP; see immediately below).
1 (19)
This is an instance of the X‐bar schema (Chomsky 1970, 1986, Stowell 1981), a structural blueprint for syntactic structure. The schema contains a unified structure for each phrase: The phrase has a head (i.e. the phrase is endocentric), it has a complement as the sister of the head, and then a specifier is the “subject” of the combined unit of head and complement. (19) has three phrases: the verb phrase (VP), the tense/agreement phrase (TP), and the determiner phrase (DP). If we apply this to VP, that means that V is the head of the verb phrase, him is the complement of the verb, and she is the specifier of the verb. The subject then moves to the canonical subject position in English, which is called the specifier position of T, or SpecTP for short (strikethrough marks that the constituent is not pronounced).10 The tense and agreement morphology starts out as the head of TP and then gets unified in the morphology with the verb stem like. Now we are ready to go back to the problem posed by the data in (18).
In (19), she is in the specifier position of T, which is the locus of nominative case. Rather differently, him is the complement of the verb, which is to say that accusative case is licensed in that position. As for (18c), this is an exceptional case marking construction, since him is licensed in the specifier position of an embedded constituent. These environments for licensing case all look very different. Instead, Chomsky (1993) proposes that case licensing occurs in one type of configuration called a specifier‐head configuration. Just like the subject position seems to be an agreement configuration (as subject–verb agreement shows), Chomsky proposes that there is a similar agreement configuration for the object, except that this agreement is not visible in languages like English. This makes it possible to say that case licensing of the accusative is very similar in (18a) and (18c) despite surface differences suggesting the opposite conclusion. That is, at some point in the derivation the object and verb must stand in a specifier‐head relation so that Case can be assigned. Different variants of the view have proposed different points in the derivation where this would be achieved.11
As Lohndal and Uriagereka (2014, 510) point out, this example makes the logic of the Minimalist Program clear: (i) Assume that the basic theoretical and empirical postulates of GB Case theory are correct: lexical items get case, certain syntactic heads carry the ability to provide case to a lexical item, and case licensing occurs in certain positions. (ii) The domains in which case licensing occurs are very different. (iii) A new theory offers a novel take on what a case licensing configuration is: specifier‐head configurations, which are independently needed to account for subject–verb agreement in languages like English. Put differently, you pick a domain which is fairly well understood, you question some of the core parts of the analysis, and then you seek to develop a new and more principled and economic analysis (true to the Galilean ideal that has shaped much of Chomsky's work; see Allott, Lohndal & Rey, Chapter 33 this volume, for further discussion).
Another area that Chomsky (1993) targeted concerned larger architectural aspects, namely the components of the grammar. In GB, the grammatical architecture had the structure depicted in (17). This architecture contains a certain amount of overlap between D‐structure and LF on the one hand, and S‐structure and PF on the other hand (see Hornstein, Nunes, and Grohmann 2005 for much more discussion). D‐ and S‐structure are clearly more grammar‐internal than PF and LF, given that each sentence needs to receive a semantic encoding and a sound (or sign, as in the case of sign languages) encoding. Chomsky (1993) sets out to investigate whether these grammar‐internal levels in the derivation could be eliminated. He reasons as follows:
Each derivation determines a linguistic expression, an SD [Structural Description], which contains a pair (π, λ) meeting the interface conditions. Ideally, that would be the end of the story: each linguistic expression is an