Wolfram Hinzen introduces generative grammar and asks what it tells us about the human mind. He argues that the mind is the product not of adaptive evolutionary history but of principles and processes that are ahistorical and internalist.

This study explores the current stage of generative linguistics, the Minimalist Program, and examines its philosophical implications, tracing the basic themes back to the seventeenth-century scientific revolutions and the nineteenth-century biological tradition of formalism. Expositions of the 'philosophy of biolinguistics' have previously been few and short, and exploring the insights of recent theoretical linguists and neurobiologists can shed some much needed light on the problems posed by analytical philosophy, such as traditional questions of 'reference' and 'truth.'

This volume explores recent advancements in the Minimalist Program that adopt Stroik’s (1999, 2009) Survive Principle as the principle means of accounting for displacement phenomena in earlier versions of generative theory. These contributions bring to light many advantages and challenges that beset the Survive-minimalist framework, including topics such as the lexicon-syntax relationship, coordinate symmetries, scope, ellipsis, code-switching, and probe-goal relations. Despite the diverse, broad range of topics discussed in this volume, the papers are connected by a renewed investigation of Frampton & Gutmann’s (2002) vision of a crash-proof syntax. This volume provides new and interesting perspectives on theoretical issues that have challenged the Minimalist Program since its inception and will provide ample food for thought for syntacticians working in the Minimalist tradition and beyond.

The development of the Minimalist Program (MP), Noam Chomsky's most recent generative model of linguistics, has been highly influential over the last twenty years. It has had significant implications not only for the conduct of linguistic analysis itself, but also for our understanding of the status of linguistics as a science. The reflections and analyses in this book contain insights into the strengths and the weaknesses of the MP. These include: a clarification of the content of the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT); a synthesis of Chomsky's linguistic and interdisciplinary discourses; and an analysis of the notion of optimal computation from conceptual, empirical and philosophical perspectives. This book will encourage graduate students and researchers in linguistics to reflect on the foundations of their discipline, and the interdisciplinary nature of the topics explored will appeal to those studying biolinguistics, neurolinguistics, the philosophy of language and other related disciplines.

This book lays new foundations for the study of reference and truth. It explores truth in the light of Noam Chomsky's Minimalist Program and argues that truth is a function of the human mind. It sets out an internalist reconstruction of meaning and explores its outcomes in language and thought.

In this book, leading scholars consider the ways in which syntactic variation can be accounted for in a minimalist framework. They explore the theoretical significance, content, and role of parameters; whether or not variation should be strongly or weakly accounted for by syntactic factors; and the explicitness - or lack thereof - that should be assumed with respect to the conditions imposed by narrow syntax. The book is divided into two parts. The first part contains chapters that consider the term 'parameter' to be a relevant theoretical notion under minimalist tenets. In the second part, on the other hand, chapters either argue that the term parameter amounts to no more than a label to describe variation, or assign it a less prominent role. Instead, language variation is attributed to sociolinguistic factors, language contact, frequency of use, or simply to options in the externalization of abstract syntactic relations. The book offers a valuable overview of the different approaches adopted in the study of language variation phenomena, and will appeal to theoretical linguists of all persuasions from graduate level upwards.

The Minimalist Program has advanced a research program that builds the design of human language from conceptual necessity. Seminal proposals by Frampton & Gutmann (1999, 2000, 2002) introduced the notion that an ideal syntactic theory should be ‘crash-proof’. Such a version of the Minimalist Program (or any other linguistic theory) would not permit syntactic operations to produce structures that ‘crash’. There have, however, been some recent developments in Minimalism – especially those that approach linguistic theory from a biolinguistic perspective (cf. Chomsky 2005 et seq.) – that have called the pursuit of a ‘crash-proof grammar’ into serious question. The papers in this volume take on the daunting challenge of defining exactly what a ‘crash’ is and what a ‘crash-proof grammar’ would look like, and of investigating whether or not the pursuit of a ‘crash-proof grammar’ is biolinguistically appealing.