Minimalist Program - Theoretical Goals - Economy

Economy

The MP 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 peripheral aspects of transformational grammar.

  • 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 this information is only interpretable once a relationship is formed between the subject and the verb, so movement of the subject is required.
  • 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, which are equivalent to constraints on the mapping between the conceptual/intensional and sensori-motor interfaces in the optimal system that minimalism seeks to explore.

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    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)