Proposed LSA 2025 Workshop

 Title: Foundations of Minimalist Syntax

Format: Workshop

Organizers: Andreas Blümel (Universität Göttingen/Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, andreas.bluemel@hu-berlin.de) and Chris Collins (New York University, cc116@nyu.edu)

Time span: 3 hours

Call for Organized Session Proposals

Abstract: 

What is language? How does it distinguish humans from other species? And what does it mean to investigate language from a biolinguistic perspective? 

This short-course will discuss the foundations of minimalist syntax, a framework dedicated to seeking answers to these questions. It takes as a starting point two “primary empirical conditions”: “How can a particular language be acquired on the basis of available evidence, the problem of Poverty of Stimulus […]?” and “[h]ow can the faculty of language […] have evolved under the conditions of human evolution?” (Chomsky to appear/MC: 2) It becomes more feasible to meet the evolutionary condition if the language faculty has a very simple computational core. Just how this simple computational core interacts with other properties of the faculty of language has been a matter of investigation within the last 20 to 30 years. Meeting the condition of acquisition, in turn, requires integrating the three factors “innate structure, external data, laws of nature” (MC: fn. 8).

This course considers the most recent developments within this line of research and attempts to reconstruct and deduce syntactic theory from the big-picture questions posed above to concrete empirical analysis. Topics to be covered include the definition of Merge, labels, internal versus external Merge, distinguishing between copies and repetitions, the definition of workspaces, the definition of a derivation, the duality of semantics, the A-/A' distinction, the definition of UG, the role of economy conditions and the Strong Minimalist Thesis. The texts for the course will be Collins & Stabler 2016, Chomsky 2021, MC, and Chomsky et. al. 2023.

References:

Chomsky, Noam. 2021. Minimalism: Where are we now, and where can we hope to go. Gengo Kenkyu 160, 1-41 (GK)

Chomsky, N. to appear. The Miracle Creed and SMT. To appear in Matteo Greco & Davide Mocci, eds. ( http://www.icl.keio.ac.jp/news/2023/Miracle%20Creed-SMT%20FINAL%20%2831%29%201-23.pdf )

Chomsky et. al. 2023. Merge and the Strong Minimalist Thesis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Collins, Chris and Edward Stabler. 2016. A formalization of minimalist syntax. Syntax, 19(1):43–78.