1 - A Whig History of Generative Grammar

Summary

The chapter locates the Minimalist Program (MP) in the wider context of the Generative Program (GP). It argues that MP is the next logical step for GP to take given the relative success of two prior projects: (i) explaining how linguistic creativity (the capacity to use and understand an unbounded number of different hierarchically organized linguistic objects) is possible and (ii) explaining how linguistic flexibility (the human meta-capacity to acquire the grammatical recursive procedures that undergird linguistic creativity) is possible. The argument is that given that we (roughly) understand what kinds of recursive procedures natural language grammars (Gs) contain, and given that we (roughly) understand key aspects of the fine structure of the faculty of language (FL), MP asks the obvious next question of why FL has the particular structure it has.