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Chomsky's Minimalism by Pieter A. M. Seuren is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Chomsky's Minimalism about?

<p>Noam Chomsky's current theory, published in 1995, is known as <b>The Minimalist Program</b> and has been presented as his crowning achievement. It argues, familiarly, that there exists a universal grammar that is hardwired, and that, like an efficient machine, this grammar will tend to use the least possible number of constraints (phonetically and syntactically) to produce an utterance. Minimalism has spawned in linguistics an entire research program, despite being fundamentally misguided, according to distinguished linguist and philosopher of language Pieter Seuren.</p> <p>Seuren's accessible and spirited attack argues that the Minimalist Program is deeply flawed. He proposes that it fails to satisfy the basic criteria for sound scientific work, such as respect for data, unambiguous formulations, and falsifiability. Seuren points to the original acrimonious split in the 1960s and 1970s between Chomsky's generative grammar and the alternative generative semantics proposed by his followers, and argues that the latter theory was sounder and unfairly suppressed. Seuren maintains that this suppression—and the cult surrounding Chomsky and Minimalism more generally—has done great dama

Author

Pieter A. M. Seuren

Publisher

IRL Press at Oxford University Press

Published

2004

Language

EN

ISBN

9780195173055

Subjects

Linguistics, Language Learning, Literary Fiction