Linguistic Minimalism

Download or read book Linguistic Minimalism written by Cedric Boeckx and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006-08-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Minimalist Program for linguistic theory is Noam Chomsky's boldest and most radical version of his naturalistic approach to language. Cedric Boeckx examines its foundations, explains its underlying philosophy, exemplifies its methods, and considers the significance of its empirical results.

Download or read book Linguistic Minimalism written by Cedric Boeckx and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-08-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a self-contained introduction to the Minimalist Program for linguistic theory, the boldest and most radical version of Noam Chomsky's naturalistic approach to language. Cedric Boeckx examines its foundations, explains its underlying philosophy, exemplifies its methods, and considers the significance of its empirical results. He explores the roots and antecedents of the Program and shows how its methodologies parallel those of sciences such as physics and biology. He disentangles and clarifies current debates and issues around the nature of minimalist research in linguistics and shows how the aims and ambitions of the Minimalist Program lie at the centre of the enterprise to understand how the human language faculty operates in the mind and is manifested in the world's languages. The book contains a glossary of key concepts, each one illustrated with relevant examples drawn from a variety of languages.

Download or read book Minimalist Investigations in Linguistic Theory written by Howard Lasnik and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-06-28 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Howard Lasnik is one of the world's leading theoretical linguists. He has produced influential and important work in areas such as syntactic theory, logical form, and learnability. This collection of essays draws together some of his best work from his substantial contribution to linguistic theory.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism written by Cedric Boeckx and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides a complete assessment of the current achievements and challenges of the Minimalist Program. Leading researchers explore the origins of the program, the course of its research, and its connections with other disciplines, such as developmental biology, cognitive science, computational science, and philosophy of mind.

Download or read book Minimalism written by Hartmut Obendorf and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-12 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of Minimalism is proposed as a theoretical tool supporting a more differentiated understanding of reduction and thus forms a standpoint that allows definition of aspects of simplicity. Possible uses of the notion of minimalism in the field of human–computer interaction design are examined both from a theoretical and empirical viewpoint, giving a range of results. Minimalism defines a radical and potentially useful perspective for design analysis. The empirical examples show that it has also proven to be a useful tool for generating and modifying concrete design techniques. Divided into four parts this book traces the development of minimalism, defines the four types of minimalism in interaction design, looks at how to apply it and finishes with some conclusions.

Download or read book Reflections on language evolution written by Cedric Boeckx and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay reflects on the fact that as we learn more about the biological underpinnings of our language faculty, the dominant evolutionary narrative coming out of the linguistic tradition most explicitly oriented towards biology ("biolinguistics") appears increasingly implausible. This text offers ways of opening up linguistic inquiry and fostering interdisciplinarity, taking advantage of new opportunities to provide quantitative, testable hypotheses concerning the complex evolutionary path that led to the modern human language faculty. The essay is structured around three main themes: (i) renewed appreciation for the comparative method applied to cognitive questions, leading to the identification of elementary but fundamental abstractions in non-linguistic species relevant to language; (ii) awareness of the conceptual gaps between disciplines, and the need to carefully link genotype and phenotype without bypassing any "intermediate" levels of description (certainly not the brain); and (iii) adoption of a "philosophical" outlook that puts the complexity of biological entities front and center.

Download or read book Linguistic Variation in the Minimalist Framework written by M. Carme Picallo and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, leading scholars consider the ways in which syntactic variation can be accounted for in a minimalist framework. They explore the theoretical significance, content, and role of parameters; whether or not variation should be strongly or weakly accounted for by syntactic factors; and the explicitness - or lack thereof - that should be assumed with respect to the conditions imposed by narrow syntax. The book is divided into two parts. The first part contains chapters that consider the term 'parameter' to be a relevant theoretical notion under minimalist tenets. In the second part, on the other hand, chapters either argue that the term parameter amounts to no more than a label to describe variation, or assign it a less prominent role. Instead, language variation is attributed to sociolinguistic factors, language contact, frequency of use, or simply to options in the externalization of abstract syntactic relations. The book offers a valuable overview of the different approaches adopted in the study of language variation phenomena, and will appeal to theoretical linguists of all persuasions from graduate level upwards.