In this book, Peter Culicover and Giuseppe Varaschin (henceforth C&V) present a detailed critique of Minimalism and the earlier work from which it derives, and outline an alternative, construction-based approach, which, following Culicover & Jackendoff (Reference Culicover and Jackendoff2005), they call Simpler Syntax. There have been other critiques of Minimalism, but arguably none has been so thorough, and this is not just about Minimalism, and not just a critique. Thus, it is an important book, which deserves to be widely read.
Minimalism emerged in the early 1990s and has now been with us as long as all the earlier approaches associated with the name Chomsky combined. It seems to have had less impact than some of the earlier approaches. The Government and Binding (GB) approach, which preceded it, won a number of converts, but this does not seem to have happened with Minimalism. Some syntacticians decided some time ago that they had seen enough and that they could safely ignore it. However, it remains the most widely assumed approach in syntactic theory, and unless it is challenged, this will continue to be the case. It is good, therefore, that C&V have kept on top of developments and are able to set out a detailed challenge.
To many outsiders, a particularly striking feature of Minimalism is its sheer complexity. Syntactic facts and also many semantic and morphological facts are viewed as the product of long and complex derivations involving a variety of invisible elements. Early Minimalism had structures that were more complex than those assumed a decade earlier in the early days of GB as a result of the idea that functional categories are associated with as much structure as lexical categories and the idea that all branching is binary, and over the decades they have become more complex as a result of ideas about antisymmetry and cartography. Now they are as complex as anything proposed in Generative Semantics (GS) in its heyday. Someone new to the field might be surprised to learn that an approach wedded to this kind of complexity is called ‘minimalist’.
There are obvious questions here: How has this complexity arisen? Is it justified? Are there simpler alternatives? These questions are central to the present book. In the course of addressing them, C&V discuss many different issues. One might think that it would have been better if they could have ranged a little less widely, but probably they were keen to forestall responses of the form: ‘But what about X?’ I will concentrate here on what seem to me the most important elements of the book and pass over a number of other interesting matters without comment.
C&V argue that three dubious ideas, stemming from earlier work, underly the complexities of Minimalism. Firstly, there is the idea that order is a simple reflection of structure. As this is commonly understood, it follows that head-complement orders and complement-head orders cannot, as in some frameworks, be a case of the same structure being linearized differently in different languages, but must reflect different structures. (A common view is that the latter reflects the movement of the complement to some higher position.) Secondly, there is the idea that meaning too is a simple reflection of structure. This entails among other things that if X has scope over Y, they cannot be sisters. Rather, Y must be a constituent of a sister of X. Finally, there is what C&V call interface uniformity, the assumption that ‘when two expressions share some meaning, the shared meaning corresponds uniformly to some shared syntactic structure in the expressions’ (7), As an example they cite the Universal Theta-Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) of Baker (Reference Baker1988). Added to this, C&V see a tendency to treat tentative conjectures as well-established facts and to use them as basis for further conjectures. These matters are explored in the first five chapters of the book.
It is often suggested that Minimalism is quite simple because it has just one important mechanism: Merge, with movement as a specific case. However, as C&V show, a great deal of machinery is required to get this one mechanism to give the right results, results which in other frameworks would be the product of simple statements about the properties of various constructions. C&V call the Minimalist approach ‘cryptoconstructionalism’, and they discuss how it developed in Chapter 3. Central to this approach are movement processes of various kinds and a variety of invisible elements, and they are discussed in detail in Chapters 4 and 5. In Chapter 4, C&V argue that while movement can be made to give the right results, they can be achieved more simply in non-movement analyses. In Chapter 5, they argue that invisible elements may sometimes be justified, but that they have often been assumed where there is no good justification.
In Chapters 6 and 7, C&V look more closely at the kind of constituent structure that is assumed within Minimalism. In Chapter 6 they show that it makes it difficult to handle phenomena such as heavy-NP-shift, extraposition, and VP topicalization. They also show how different phenomena suggest different structures if a structural approach is taken. Thus, on a structural approach to quantifier binding, (1) suggests that an object c-commands elements in a following adverbial clause.
But on a structural approach to disjoint reference, (2) suggests that this is not the case:
In Chapter 7, C&V look in a general way at which phenomena do and do not provide evidence for constituent structure. Their conclusion is that distribution, valence, and agreement do, but that binding, islands, and linear order constraints do not.
C&V go on to argue in Chapters 8 and 9 that Minimalism is problematic not just in its approach to syntax but also in its approach to semantics and morphology, which it views as in part the product of the same machinery. In Chapter 8, they look critically at attempts to provide a syntactic account of semantic phenomena like quantifier scope, interpretation of pronouns as bound variables, and coreference. In Chapter 9, they turn to morphology, focusing especially on the idea that words often derive from complex syntactic structures, e.g. shelve from the same sort of structure as put on the shelf. This is where Minimalism resembles GS most closely, not merely being as complex as GS, but being complex in the same way. An obvious issue is that many nouns do not have this kind of related verb. There is, for example, no verb mantlepiece meaning ‘put on the mantlepiece’. Thus, the framework needs a lexicon of some kind recording what lexemes the language actually has and what their properties are. Given this, it is not clear what the point of such derivations is. Chapter 10 provides further critical discussion of Minimalism, including, among other things, recent proposals about labelling.
The various chapters set out a strong case against the framework. They should give anyone attracted to it considerable pause for thought. But what about alternatives?
There have long been alternatives to Minimalism which avoid its complex structures, e.g. Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Categorial Grammar. The Simpler Syntax framework set out here is another alternative. The presentation of Simpler Syntax is intermingled with the critique of Minimalism, with the basic properties described in Section 1.4 of the first chapter, and most chapters saying something about it. It is a construction-based framework, in which constructions, like words, link semantic, syntactic, and phonological properties. The relation between phonology and semantics is largely mediated by syntax, but the approach allows direct links, and the syntactic properties are kept as simple as possible.
A central feature of the syntax is very flat structures, flatter than those assumed in the Chomskyan mainstream with its commitment to binary branching, but also flatter than the sort of structures that stem from Jackendoff (Reference Jackendoff1977), in which there are both full phases (XPs) and intermediate phrases (X’s). C&V assume only the former.
Phonological and semantic representations differ from syntactic representations in various ways. Phonological representations are ordered, while syntactic representations are unordered. But they may also differ in more complex ways. Thus, on page 57, C&V propose an analysis of German main clauses in which the verb is within VP but its phonology appears in C. This is essentially an analogue of Minimalism’s head movement. Semantic representations are more structured than syntactic representations, and C&V discuss how appropriate semantic representations can be associated with flat syntactic representations in Section 6.6.
C&V compare and contrast Minimalism and Simpler Syntax in Chapter 10. They argue that Simpler Syntax is both better able to deal with the facts and more compatible with what it is reasonable to assume about evolution and learning. They also argue that it is more deserving of the label ‘minimalist’.
Naturally, there are questions that can be asked about Simpler Syntax. On page 14, C&V say that ‘[a] well-formed expression must be such that each of its parts fully satisfies at least one constraint in the grammar’. This raises the question: What is a part? Someone familiar with HSPG might think that it is a local tree consisting of an element and its daughters. But the analysis of German main clauses shows that it may be something larger. Some further discussion would have been useful here.
Another issue in this area concerns English pre-subject auxiliaries. Within Minimalism, these are a product of head-movement just like pre-subject verbs in German, but C&V do not invoke their analogue of head-movement here. They assume instead that they are just the product of an alternative ordering of sister elements. It would be good to know why they see them differently.
A related issue concerns English finite auxiliaries. C&V appear to assume that non-finite auxiliaries are verbs but that finite auxiliaries are members of the T(ense) category. This is essentially the Minimalist position, and given their widespread rejection of Minimalist ideas, it is somewhat surprising to see C&V adopting it. It would be good to know why they reject the view, originating in Ross (Reference Ross and Todd1969) and developed recently in Sag et al. (Reference Sag, Chaves, Abeillé, Estigarribia, Flickinger, Kay, Michaelis, Müller, Pullum and Van Eynde2020), that auxiliaries are not lexemes with forms in two different categories but just irregular verbs.
Essentially, I am saying that it would be good to have more discussion of some issues. Others might well say the same of other matters that C&V discuss. On the other hand, as noted earlier, some may also think the discussion could have been usefully shortened in various ways. All this just shows that it’s hard to write a book like this. But this is an important book. Both the critique of Minimalism and the work from which it derives, and the outline of Simpler Syntax are important for anyone with an open mind on the issues. It should make anyone new to the field think twice before assuming that Minimalism is the framework that they should adopt just because it is the most widely assumed framework, and it should increase the likelihood that they will give serious consideration to alternatives. Together with other recent works such as Culicover (Reference Culicover2021) and Chaves & Putnam (Reference Chaves and Putnam2020), it could help to promote a more productive kind of syntactic theorizing than the approach which has been dominant for more than three decades.
