Minimalist program

PHASES, PROBES AND GOALS IN THE M.P
INTRODUCTION
The Minimalist Program (which we may henceforth be referred to as MP) reveals the inner
workings of a very simple linguistic computer. It is a further development on the theory of
syntax with a goal toward minimality. Due to this, some economy-driven principles have
been adopted to replace some other principles in Government and Binding Theory (GB)
which is more appropriately known as Principles and Parameters Theory (PPT).
Emergence of Minimalism
In the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, much research in transformational grammar was inspired
by Chomsky's Minimalist Program. The "Minimalist Program" aims at the further
development of ideas involving economy of derivation and economy of representation, which
had started to become significant in the early 1990s, but were still rather peripheral aspects of
Transformational-generative grammar theory.
1. Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements (i.e. transformations) only
occur in order to match interpretable features with uninterpretable features. An example
of an interpretable feature is the plural inflection on regular English nouns, e.g. dogs. The
word dogs can only be used to refer to several dogs, not a single dog, and so this
inflection contributes to meaning, making it interpretable. English verbs are inflected
according to the number of their subject (e.g. "Dogs bite" vs "A dog bites"), but in most
sentences this inflection just duplicates the information about number that the subject
noun already has, and it is therefore uninterpretable.
2. Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a
purpose, i.e. the structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than
required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality.
Both notions, as described here, are somewhat vague, and indeed the precise formulation of
these principles is controversial. An additional aspect of minimalist thought is the idea that
the derivation of syntactic structures should be uniform; that is, rules should not be stipulated
as applying at arbitrary points in a derivation, but instead apply throughout derivations.

Minimalist approaches to phrase structure have resulted in "Bare Phrase Structure", an
attempt to eliminate X-bar theory. In 1998, Chomsky suggested that derivations proceed in
"phases". The distinction of Deep Structure vs. Surface Structure is not present in Minimalist
theories of syntax, and the most recent phase-based theories also eliminate LF and PF as
unitary levels of representation.
Terminologies in M.P
 Morpho-syntactic features: These are features that are marked for tense, gender,
number and case.
 Un-interpretable feature: A feature that is not fully specified.
 Interpretable Feature: A feature that is better specified.
Minimalist Program Framework
Lexicon
Numeration
Spell-Out
PF LF
The Spell-out: This is a single point of interaction between syntax and the interfaces (sound
and meaning).
Derivation by Phases
In the Minimalist model, syntactic derivations occur in particular stages or domains
called phases. A phase is a syntactic domain. A simple sentence is decomposed into two
phases: CP and VP (VP, also known as light verb phrase, is a functional phrase which selects
the lexical VP as its complement; CP means complementiser phrase through which we
analyse Wh movement). CP Movement of a constituent out of a phase is only permitted if the
constituent has first been moved to the left edge of the phase. This is the initial conception.
Actually, the debate on phases is wider than this.

PROBE AND GOALS
What are probes and goals?
In all models of the syntactic computation that make use of probe and goal (for example
Chomsky, 2000, 2001, 2004; Frampton and Gutmann, 2000; Pesetsky and Torrego, 2001,
2004) it is simply postulated that probes are heads and goals are phrases. On closer
examination, though, the distinction is not as clear cut. A head, on the one hand, is a probe
when it is first merged with another element. Once it has probed it has the possibility of being
a goal for a probe higher in the structure.1 Phrases, on the other hand, can only be goals.
Since different approaches within the Minimalist Program (MP) have slightly different
definitions of a probe, it is important to first make clear what a probe actually is.
In some syntactic models (Chomsky, 2001, 2004; Frampton and Gutmann, 2000) a
probe is a head:
(1) Feature checking, then, resolves to pairs of heads <H, H0 >
[. . . ]. For optimal computation, one member of the pair must
be available with no search. It must, therefore, be the head H
of the construction ® under consideration, ®=fH, XPg. Call
H a probe P, which seeks a goal G within XP;... ” (Chomsky,
2004, 113)
The head H is a probe only if it has uninterpretable/unvalued feature(s) (Chomsky, 2001,
2004). This means that in these models there is a tight connection between unvalued features
and heads; a head that is a probe must have an unvalued
feature.
In other models, e.g. Pesetsky and Torrego’s (2001; 2004) and Rezac (2003), it is not
the actual head that probes but the unvalued feature. Pesetsky and Torrego’s (2004, 2)
definition of a probe is given in (2) (their (2i)):
(2) an unvalued feature F (a probe) on a head H scans its c-command domain for another
instance of F (a goal) with which to agree. (emphasis in original)
The consequence of this is that one single head may have more than one probe. Even
though a probe and a head are not the same thing in this model there is still a tight connection
between the two; only heads have unvalued features that are probes.

Clearly, there is no motivation in neither definition why only heads with unvalued features, or
unvalued features on heads, are probes. If we take for granted a tight connection between
probes and heads, one (in)direct reason to assume that unvalued features in phrases do not
probe outside the maximal projection of the phrase could be that there are substantial
differences between heads and phrases in other areas of syntax. The fact that both heads and
phrases may act as goals is not surprising. All features (valued and unvalued, interpretable
and uninterpretable) of heads and phrases are in the c-command domain of higher probes.
This is a consequence of the syntactic derivation and not a stipulation. Hence, that both
phrases and heads may be goals will not be discussed further in this paper.
The following discussion makes no distinction between the definitions in (1) and (2).
What I say about heads with unvalued features is applicable to unvalued features on heads as
well.

Minimalist program

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Minimalist program