The Minimalist Program (Current Studies in Linguistics)

Rating:
Summary: What every linguist needs to read....
Review: It is well known that the Chomskyans don't listen to criticism, however well taken.

The result is the 1995 Chomsky essays, in which relatively well known and primitive problems of English syntax are clothed in practically unreadable technical language, to lead to highly artificial pretentious solutions which are as counterintuitive as you please. Not as if simpler solutions weren't possible.

In the meanwhile, the entire ivory tower of MIT linguistics has become an impregnable fortress of sectarians who will only deal with the problem of the most perfect formal presentations of well known linguistic problems in their own narrow theoretical framework, regardless of new research in the facts of language, as discovered daily by the language statisticians and the sociolinguists for example.

One cannot enter the fortress because they have made it inaccessible. But it is not uncomfortable to have the fortress in one's back, because nobody will come out, either to meet criticism or to face new empirical evidence about language.

Rating:
Summary: Fiction Can Be Fun
Review: Minimalism, like GB and Perameters, is yet another figment of Chomsky's imagination - much like his idea that McDonald's, Israel, and the American government are out to poison him.

Chomsky's theories are to Linguistics what Creationism is to Real Science. You start with your conclusion ("language is binary!" or "grammar is universal!") and then you come up with arguments that will support your conclusion while at the same time ignoring the enormity of evidence that refutes it.

On a lighter note, Chomsky's theories have consistantly failed to contribute anything viable to linguistics, technology, or humankind for the last 40 years. In this, his 6th or 7th infallible theory, Chomsky has decided to downsize his program in the hope that it will all somehow miraculously become correct.

Although Chomsky calls his program "minimalist", it is anything but. Chomsky's Minimalism is a hodgepodge mixture of about 119 individual theorums which bare no thread of coherence, and yet still only manage to describe about 63% of English. In spite of this, he still claims his model of Syntax is "universal" and applies to all languages. But let's face the facts.

- Chomsky's Syntactic models don't hold up in computers. Not in 1960s computers, not in today's computers. Blame it on semantics, blame it on parole, results are inevitably the same: crash, crash, crash.

- Chomsky's syntactic structures crash because they don't exist. An arbitrary idea rooted in a concept that doesn't exist can't work. Because it doesn't exist. Chomsky can blame this on "untestability" all he wants, but the fact remains that every theory he's come up with has proved completely useless to both computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, and thus has implications for nothing.

- None of Chomsky's theories have a scientifically verifiable basis either, so he's never actually "discovered" anything. He's simply made up imaginary processes, designated them with terms he finds pleasing (e.g. "percolation", "pied-piping") and passed them off as linguistic truths. In the process, all he's done is invent a fantasy world full of abstract and 'conveniently opaque' terminology that allows Mitniks to pose as specialists in this or that field of his imaginary science.

- That being said, none of Chomsky's programs are the least bit useful in teaching or acquiring language. His grammars are meaningless to normal people, and thus entirely useless.

In conclusion, given the fact that language can't be stuffed into arbitrary mathematic formulas just because Anglocentric hippies prefer to be thought of as 'scientists', and given the fact that genuine Syntax is obviously language specific, and given the fact that genuine Syntax could be explained in as short and simple a fashion as basic Morphology were it not for this deep-seated Chomskian bureaucracy that has enveloped modern Linguistics to the point where the field has become virtually useless for any practical application, all I can say about Chomsky's Minimalist Program is: what filth. Here's to the 46th year of new ideas being rejected in maintenance of ignorance.

Rating:
Summary: Pish posh
Review: Oh, we're sorry. This book is the absolute last word in linguistics and its relation to the neuro-computational-cognitive sciences. Until Chomsky writes the Extended Last Word in Linguistics, a few years down the line.

Rating:
Summary: fascinating....
Review: This is a very interesting text. Chomsky, asks the following question in his "Minimalist Program": Suppose that we do have a basic language faculty (inherent in all people and by nature--very creative mental faculty), then what can we say about this system? How well designed is it? Can we ask deeper questions about the mind? What is the fundamental nature of human intellectual capacities? Although these of questions might be a bit premature to even pose, Chomsky gives some fascinating responses to these questions.
This book, not only summarizes some previous work, but it also breaks new ground as well. I would suggest it to anyone who is interested in the philosophical and linguistic questions of the mind and language. The only thing one should remember is that the text will be incomprehensible if he/she doesn't have a very strong background in linguistics (esp Chap 4!). If not, there are prep books that will help you understand the basic underlying concepts in the Minimalist Program. Also, Chomsky gives a lot of interviews where he explains, in lay terms, what his work is dealing with.

Lastly, regarding the other reviews, please stick to criticizing the book, and not the author. If one disagrees with what's being said, then refute the argument in an intelligble manner. Don't resort to childish name-calling, bashing and other foolish activities.