A Study on Syntactic Minimalism from Cognitive Perspective
Zhang Songson · Journal of Yangzhou University · 2014
The minimalist inquiry of language and its scientific advantages and rationality need reexamination.Contrastive analysis of two typical syntactic constructions———passives and long-distance dependencies———between English and Chinese,exemplifies that the practical operations of Chomsky's Minimalist Program not only wax the complexity of Universal Grammar,but also reduce its learnability due to its invisibility to semantics.The Evolutionary Constraint and Descriptive Constraint require licensing by constraints rather than derivation by rule,unification rather than merging,a redundant lexicon rather than a nonredundant one,and multiply branching rather than binary branching trees.