None of this necessarily requires us to deny the empirical data or the explanatory principles on which mature versions of the earlier so-called ‘Principles and Parameters’ framework were based (see ). To the extent that we succeed in relevant re-descriptions, we will have arrived at a more rational account of language that goes some way to explaining why it is the way it is. This sort of objective has been central to minimalist practice, and in some ways it is part of rational scientific practice as such. In the latter case, the task arises to re-describe them in a way that they come to fit into our picture of what the facts should rationally be. Then a puzzle arises: why is what we find - the facts of language - not what we would rationally expect? That may then lead to either suspect that other, extraneous factors were involved to yield an apparently sub-optimal design, or else to conclude that perhaps we misdescribed the earlier ‘facts'. Now suppose that, nonetheless, we had empirical reasons for the existence of such levels. For example, we might conclude that, given the assumption that the computational system of language essentially links sound and meaning, there shouldn't be any levels of representations in it that are superfluous with respect to this specific task of linking. That might end the Minimalist quest, but then consider that we might ask what the facts of language should be, for them to make more sense. It is in this way that Minimalism is intrinsically a project in comparative cognition and language evolution as well, in a way that no earlier incarnations of the generative project in linguistics has been.Įxpectedly, if we engage in such an explanatory quest, in the beginning most apparent facts of language will simply not make any deeper sense to us. This latter question crucially includes the question of how these and other structural facts are similar to those operative in other cognitive domains or else whether they are special to language, and why a language of this specific type evolved, as opposed to communication systems of many other imaginable kinds. But it is a completely different question why all this should be so. So it is one thing, for example, to find empirically that human clauses, architecturally, fall into roughly three layers: the verbal layer (VP), the tense layer (TP), and the Complementizer layer (CP, forming part of the ‘left periphery’ of the clause) or that sentences demand subjects, an apparently universal fact of language, still largely opaque, which is captured under the name of the ‘EPP-principle' or that locality is a crucial and universal constraint on grammatical operations. Minimalism, in short, is not a study of the facts of languages, but why they should obtain. Yet, it is worth emphasizing that the attempt is to ‘rationalize’ language more than to describe it. Any such attempt will naturally involve a scrutiny of the question of what these principles have been taken to be, and it will also likely lead to a re-conceptualization of many of them, hence also to new descriptive work in the study of languages. Despite all that - and perhaps because of it - Minimalism centrally aims to transgress descriptive work in linguistics in favour of a form of explanation that is, in a sense to be clarified, ‘principled’ and that makes us understand why the apparent laws of language are the ones they are - in short, why things fall into the cross-linguistic patterns that they seem to do. All that is in the absence of an agreement of what the overall descriptive and explanatory framework of linguistic theory should be, and in fact relatively little discussion on the issue of frameworks among theoretical linguists, who usually simply think of themselves as belonging to one or another particular school. The precise characterization of basic construction types such as passives, islands, existentials or possessives even within single languages is wide open, and there can be no doubt cross-linguistic descriptive work will continue for a long time to come. Linguistic theory is nowhere near complete. Wolfram Hinzen, in Philosophy of Linguistics, 2012 1.1 Description versus explanation
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