This vignette explores the form and function of the Workspace (WS) in recent minimalist theory. Since its introduction in Chomsky’s (1994) Bare Phrase Structure, Merge has been underspecified, particularly with respect to the elements that Merge can (and cannot) target. Consider the fact that Merge can build objects in parallel: putting together the and man, for example, and eats and apples, before forming The man eats apples. Informally speaking, we can ask “where” are these objects? Does “where” they are matter; does it play a role in the syntax? In recent work, Chomsky has sought to clarify this by introducing and using in novel ways the notion of “the workspace.” Simply put, the WS is a set of syntactic objects – lexical items and objects constructed by Merge. The WS represents at any given point of a derivation the available computational recourses. This has certain important consequences for how Merge operates, allowing the specification of a third-factor-constrained search procedure on the elements that Merge can access and a natural limit on the expansion of the WS as the derivation proceeds, with interesting empirical results.

This vignette looks at properties of Late Insertion (LI) from the Minimalist Program (MP) point of view. Whereas LI is not a tenet of the MP, and is largely motivated by morphological realizational theories, its effects are derivative of syntactic effects in a way that connects with different parts of Minimalist syntax. LI severs the projection of structures determined by a lexical item’s properties from processes that produce its form and meaning. This is compatible with the MP, which aims for a simple, “minimal,” and abstract syntax, placing the burden on interfaces. LI hypothesizes the presence of two domains in the formation of complex objects, which exhibit systematic sets of interactions and contextual effects on both form and meaning sides. The vignette focuses on the form side, concerning conditions under which morphemes may interact to determine each other’s form: allomorphy. This idea of contextual effects is derivative of syntactic locality effects that connect with the MP’s phase theory. The vignette touches on the issue of LI for functional morphemes versus Root, and how insertion of certain features after syntax in the PF component enriches the output of the syntax.

This chapter aims to provide an update on the research questions that guide generative linguistics as well as on the methodologies that synthesize the evidential basis of the field, reflecting three crucial dimensions: (i) the importance of having a theory, (ii) the relation between theory and measurements, and (iii) the results this coupling of theory and measurements has produced in the last three decades of generative research. Putting these three dimensions together, the discussion examines the answers that minimalism and the research that was developed on its basis offer with respect to how language works (behavior), through the experimental lens we have on its operation (observables), in the form of a principled approach to what has been measured, why so, and what are the adduced explanations (theory).

The book aims to pick up the logical analysis of language, as Russell conceived of it in his Principles of Mathematics, by bringing out the structural components of context-sensitivity and their fundamental, if not primitive, mathematical counterparts. Chapter 1 offers an overview of the literature and challenges the uncritical “context-unit assumption” that the semantic content of every context-sensitive expression depends on one context at a time. It then argues that any semantic content of any utterance comes from some prior content, by transposition from some context of reference to the current context. Thus, the content of the utterance depends primarily on the context-shift from which the context of utterance originates. Moreover, the linguistic meaning of an expression is understood as built up by transposition and collation of more specific contents. The ensuing picture is shown both to cover the full spread of context-sensitivity without giving up the prospect of its formal representation and to account for the connection between meaning and content without sacrificing one for the other.

Syntactic reconstruction poses a unique set of challenges to comparative philologists, and this has led some authors to go so far as to claim it is impossible. This chapter begins by evaluating these challenges and how troubling they are for the enterprise of syntactic reconstruction. With this baseline established, the author turns to the specific attempts that have been made at reconstructing syntax, in particular with reference to Proto-Indo-European. Although some aspects of syntax were treated as early as the Neo-Grammarians, the earliest concerted efforts to treat Proto-Indo-European syntax on its own terms date to the latter half of the twentieth century. There have been several different approaches to syntactic reconstruction since then, which fall broadly into four categories: Typological reconstruction; Pattern-based approaches; Construction Grammar; and Minimalist reconstruction. This chapter argues that, while it is not the only viable methodology, Minimalist Reconstruction provides the most suitable means for the task of reconstructing relative clause syntax in Proto-Indo-European.

A reading of the best-known experimental work of 1976, Einstein on the Beach, that traces the sources of its imagery in mass media, popular culture, and art history, and that studies how the kinetics and contingency of live performance complicate the classical decorum associated with Robert Wilson’s theater. The chapter also discusses the performance styles of Lucinda Childs and Sheryl Sutton, the relationship of the opera to mathematics, the value of error and the handmade, and the persistence of emotion despite the production’s apparent coolness.

Generative approaches to synchronic linguistics attempt to describe what is part of a language in a mathematically precise way, and generative approaches to the history of English and other languages model diachronic changes as a sequence of stages of the language with differing formal properties. Formalising the grammars of these stages makes falsifiable predictions about what was grammatical in each stage. Generative accounts include phonological analysis, but this chapter focuses on accounts of morphosyntactic changes. Generativists take child language acquisition to be the locus of language change, which is assumed to occur when children are exposed to different Primary Linguistic Data from what older generations encountered, due to factors like phonological change and language contact. Syntactic changes that have been studied extensively within generative frameworks include the development of modal and other auxiliary verbs, clausal negation and changes in word order, particularly in the positioning of the tensed verb.

This chapter provides an overview of the various approaches to theoretical modeling of syntactic variation in human language. Three main types of syntactic variation, i.e., word order variation, silence and doubling, are described and then used to demonstrate how different generative theories capture these phenomena. The generative theories discussed include Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG), Government and Binding (GB) Theory, Minimalism (including Optimality Theory), Nanosyntax, Distributed Morphology, and post-GB Parameter Theory (including parameter hierarchies and the Universal Spine Hypothesis). Taking into account a great many different languages and dialects, the chapter shows that strong progress has been made in our understanding of the nature, range, and limits of syntactic variation.

Reinach’s thesis that there is a legal a priori is as bold as it is interesting. It is bold because it excludes all sources of positive law and claims that certain legal propositions can be known independent of all actual legal systems. The thesis is especially interesting as it does not rely on natural law but rather on immediate insight into a priori legal propositions. Given the great variety of possible a priori propositions, the chapter focuses on necessary, essential, and nonpositive ones. All of them do not reveal a legal a priori, which casts the existence of a legal a priori into doubt. However, the phenomenon of self-evident propositions remains important. One just needs to analyse them differently with the help of nonpositive legal reasons.

The Introduction outlines the book’s six chapters. Chapter 1 presents the theoretical foundations of Generative Grammar and discusses the ‘prehistory’ of the concept of parameter in the late seventies and early eighties up to the formulation of the Principles and Parameters model of the Government and Binding (GB) framework. Chapter 2 examines the individual formulation of the main parameters that were proposed during that period, summarizing many of the central empirical concerns of research in the 1980s. Chapter 3 traces the development of the concept of parameter in early Minimalism, focusing on the debate over macro- vs. microparameters, the main criticisms raised against the parametric approach, and the latter’s subsequent reformulation within recent hierarchical models. Chapter 4 returns to the parameters of the GB Theory and evaluates their status in current generative theory. Chapter 5 is devoted specifically to the head-complement parameter, whose history arguably embodies the development of the parametric approach to linguistic variation. Chapter 6 draws the conclusions of the historical review conducted in the previous chapters and critically reconsiders the notion of parameter.

Chapter 12 looks at the abolition movement, primarily as it targets prisons but also with respect to its stance on the police. As a foil, the chapter reacts to an article entitled The Dangerous Few: Taking Seriously Prison Abolition and Its Skeptics, in which Thomas Frampton proffers several reasons why those who want to abolish prisons should not budge from their position even for offenders who are considered dangerous. This chapter rebuts each of these reasons. In the process of doing so, it demonstrates why a criminal law “minimalist” approach to prisons is preferable to abolition, not just when dealing with the dangerous few but also as a means of protecting the nondangerous many. It argues that a minimalist regime patterned on preventive justice precepts can radically reduce reliance on prisons and on the police, without the loss in crime prevention capacity and legitimacy that is likely to come with abolition.

Chapter 6 draws the conclusions of the historical review conducted in the previous chapters and critically reconsiders the notion of parameter, reevaluating both its role in Generative Grammar and its theoretical status. First, concerning Linearization parameters like the ones responsible for overt vs. covert wh-movement and head directionality, it is argued that linguistic variation can be attributed to PF-interface conditions having a disambiguating effect on a specific set of syntactic representations which cannot meet bare output conditions. Second, considering Roberts’s (2019) reformulation of argument-drop, verb movement, and V2 as instances of head movement, it is argued that Chomsky’s (2021a) extra-syntactic account of head movement suggests the possibility of developing a unified theory overcoming the duality between the ‘syntactic parameters’ accounting for the emergence of null arguments and verb movement on one side and Linearization parameters on the other. Lastly, the possibility that variation can arise in the narrow syntax is also considered, followed by some final remarks on the latest views on parametric variation in connection with current minimalist assumptions.

Chapter 3 focuses on the debate about the concept of parameter which took place during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The first two positions discussed are Kayne’s (2000, 2005) microparametric approach and Baker’s (2001, 2008) macroparametric approach. These two approaches are then confronted with Newmeyer’s (2004, 2005) criticism. Finally, two lines of linguistic inquiry which are particularly relevant to the evaluation of the notion of parameter are presented, namely Roberts and Holmberg’s (2010) hierarchical parametric model and Longobardi’s and his collaborators’ Parametric Comparison Method (PCM). On the one hand, Roberts and Holmberg’s (2010) model overcomes the limitations of micro- and macroparameters by combining a lexically based, microparametric view of linguistic variation with the idea that parametric variation is an emergent property of the interaction of Universal Grammar, primary linguistic data, and third factor considerations. On the other hand, the unprecedented results achieved by the PCM in establishing the genealogical relations among languages on the basis of syntactic comparison arguably attest to the validity of the parametric model.

Chapter 4 aims at evaluating the classical parameters of GB Theory from today’s point of view. The first parameters discussed are those concerning S′-deletion, Subjacency, long distance anaphora, the Projection Principle, and nominative Case assignment, which are shown either to refer to obsolete theoretical concepts or to be reducible to other, more basic theories. Then, the discussion turns to those parameters whose epistemological status is still being upheld in Minimalism, that is, those concerning null subject, V-to-T and V-to-C movement, polysynthesis, and overt vs. covert wh-movement, by looking at their respective minimalist reformulations. What emerges from this investigation is that, strikingly, the only traditional parameters here reviewed which still enjoy an independent theoretical status are those which in Chapter 2 have been labeled as Spellout parameters. Moreover, the overt vs. covert wh-movement parameter could well be an exception in this sense. In fact, assuming Richards N. (2010) or an equivalent PF-based account is on the right track, wh-movement pertains to the A-P interface.

This chapter advocates an ethic of “symmetric interpretation” as a solution to the challenges outlined in Chapter 1. To prevent undue politicization of constitutional law, judges should favor, when possible, constitutional understandings that are “symmetric” in the sense of conferring valuable protections across both sides of the nation’s major political and ideological divides. By the same token, they should disfavor understandings that frame constitutional law as a matter of zero-sum competition between rival partisan visions. Favoring symmetric understandings in this sense will not always be possible. When it is possible, however, favoring symmetry may provide a point of common orientation for judges with differing policy preferences and interpretive outlooks. Reflecting this approach's inherent appeal, an inchoate preference for symmetry is already evident in judges’ opinions, oral argument questions, and reasoning.

In this final chapter, we take on an issue that perhaps precedes all the others: how and why did language evolve? Linguistic theory has recently pivoted to amass considerable research on these questions. As we’ve seen over and over in the book, simpler structures have been posited across frameworks to account for the need to explain how language evolved. However, in this book, we’ve seen many distinct approaches to understand human language. A view of language evolution that permits the pluralism of the book would be consistent with the broad approach of this work. Therefore, in this chapter, I want to turn the minimalist research agenda on its head with an alternative thesis: natural language is a complex system and its emergence is likely to have been prompted by multiple interacting factors. First, we assess the current state of the art in biolinguistics and the strong saltation claim that goes with it. Then, we challenge the assumptions that’ve resulted in the saltation picture of language evolution on evolutionary grounds. Lastly, a radical approach to language evolution in terms of complexity science is proffered based on a unique connection with systems biology.