Talk:Minimalist program

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Tuf80688.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 04:14, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Changes

{{Educational Activity}} We will be providing structural edits to the current information to create a better layout of the page, and we will be adding new content to this page focused on expanding the topic of labelling in minimalist program. We also will be adding/editing content in all areas of minimalist program to make the page more reader friendly and accessible to all types of learners; specifically for those who are beginners in syntax. This is part of a course-based activity of a 3rd year syntax course, and we anticipate having completed our edits by December 16th. We would appreciate any and all constructive comments and suggestions about how to improve the overall quality of this article.

{{Educational assignment}} Over the next few weeks, we plan to flesh out the section on "phases", and "bare phrase structure". For the phase section, we will lay out in more detail the following:: (i) exemplification of a CP phase; (ii) exemplification of a vP phase; (iii) exemplification of the PIC; (iv) exemplification of the contrast between energative & unaccusative. For the "bare phrase structure" section, we will provide more detailed exemplification of: (i) step-by-step derivation; (ii) binary branching; (ii) contextual definition of 'head', 'complement', 'specifier', and 'adjunct'. OK. As promised, I did major changes to this pages, for the reasons discussed in my previous comment (See Redirection). What I did is essentially this:

(1) I brought "Bare Phrase Structure", "Phases", "Economy" and "Criticism" from Linguistic minimalism, which is now a redirect page. (2) I added "Perfection", "Research" and also the introduction. (3) I added the page to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Theoretical Linguistics and classified it (please, feel free to disagree with the classification, but do post why). Miguel (talk) 20:11, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Redirection?

I do not understand why this page redirect to "Linguistic Minimalism". I am trying to revert that and some bot does not let me. The name used in Wikipedia should be the most commonly accepted, and that is "Minimalist Program". That is the official name. Even if you could argue that some "Linguistic Minimalism" exists, that can mean anything, and it does not necessarily refers to the Minimalist Program (a term coined by Chomsky 1993). Please, if you are not aware of the history of the Minimalism Program, abstain from doing corrections here. This is a technical matter, and, since Chomsky's ideas provoke such an irrational reaction in some people, we should make an effort to keep opinions here as objective as possible, for the benefit of all Wikipedia users. I'll make the necessary changes, but please, you have to help a bit. If you have an objection, discuss it first here.Miguel (talk) 17:56, 19 March 2010 (UTC).

Primary sources

There seem to be an awful lot of primary sources here - I think I counted 10 papers or books by Noam Chomsky, and another 8 by critics of The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) or other primary work. (By the way, there are also external links within the text, a no-no per WP:EL. These should be reworked as references or external links.) I submit that it would be better to have tertiary sources, such as linguistics textbooks, or at least relatively neutral secondary sources that don't explicitly argue for or against the program. Cnilep (talk) 20:29, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Point taken about the external links

OK, I will eliminate the EL. Now, there is also a good deal of secondary sources, although perhaps they are not so evident. I overstressed the debate (which is basically a small section) just to avoid being unbalanced. As you mentioned, there are 8 critics of the program. Now, it is not accurate to say that there are "10 papers or books by Noam Chomsky" since those are just mentioned, which I think it is appropriate (they are in a list, not in the references, so they are not really the source). I think this section is very important. There are also 7 linguistic textbooks listed. I will change the name from "introductions" to "linguistic textbooks" so it is more clear. I am uncertain about what to do with the "Criticism" section, so I will wait for some other opinions before changing that. Thanks for your comments.Miguel (talk) 21:37, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

I see only two secondary sources cited as references - Boeckx 2006 and Bošković and Lasnik 2006. I'm not counting the list of "Linguistic Textbooks on Minimalism" since, apart from those two, they are not cited as references. That entire third section might better be pared down and made into a further reading section.

I also suspect that the ins and outs of the development and use of the minimalist program within theoretical linguistics may be beyond what most encyclopedia users are after. What I think is called for is a basic description of the program and its effect on the study of syntax. This is largely covered in sections 1 and 2, but assumes greater grounding in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics than I think is appropriate for a basic encyclopedia entry. Cnilep (talk) 21:38, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

I am glad we agree that books listed in that section do not count as works cited. That reduces your counting of Chomsky's citations from 10 to 3. I also like your suggestion about adding more secondary sources in the text, I will do that. And of course it is a very good idea to call the section "further reading". I do not think that we should downgrade the contents of Wikipedia just because we don't like the particular details of a theory, or because we don't believe that public should not be informed about the details of a theory, or because we don't believe it is "basic". A encyclopedia is made to explain to the general public the main concepts of any discipline. Nothing here even hints on the many technical details that the MP has. The Math pages are full of technical stuff that most people don't care about, but I don't think that the "basic" nature of Wikipedia should exclude them. We cannot misuse the argument of being "basic". It will be very easy to go page from page to the the many concepts and frameworks that one does not like, downgrading their contents, making them too vague, too inexact, too "basic". It is a way to exclude the disliked concepts from the public view.Miguel (talk) 17:11, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm not asking you to remove information but to make it accessible to those with limited background knowledge. Cnilep (talk) 16:34, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Clarify

This doesn't make sense, early on in the article: "...a kind of set of possibilities that the child learning a language can combine a limited (parameters) according to the specific properties that characterize their mother tongue." I'm not knowlegeable enough to correct it though. It makes sense if we remove the word "a" before "limited", and remove the parentheses around "parameters". But I don't know if this represents the intended meaning. Jerry (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 19:41, 15 November 2010 (UTC).

Should be fixed somewhat. Aside from being unclear, the original text was also hopelessly outdated. That characterization of the P&P framework predates minimalism by several decades and does not give an accurate picture of the version of P&P that lead into the MP. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.130.128.182 (talk) 12:52, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Tree image

I made a nice tree image to replace the current third tree in the "Bare Phrase Structure" section. Here it is:

Add caption here

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to add it in a way that incorporates it into the text, rather than as a thing on the side. Can anyone help? --N-k (talk) 00:30, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

And I just made two more, if anyone is interested:

Add caption here

Add caption here

--N-k (talk) 00:38, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! I just saw these, and I added them to the pageMiguel (talk) 00:49, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Phases

The phases section is all befuddled between phases and phrases. I dont know enough to correct it myself — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.136.94.41 (talk) 02:55, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

On the theoretic vs. programmatic nature of the MP and the representation of MP critique in this article

I have deleted the following comment from the introductory of the article. It had remained there for over six years to date. For over five of those years, it has been tagged with 'citation needed' (as of January 2011).

The sentence is:

The MP lays out a very specific view of the basis of syntactic grammar that, when compared to other formalisms, is often taken to look very much like a theory.  (User:TwigsCogito (talk | contribs) 22:53, 21 March 2010 (UTC))

The content was added by a trained linguist (Ph.D UPenn 2010) now professionally employed outside of academia who, as a Wikipedian, has not contributed to any linguistic articles since December of 2011. It doesn't appear to have been subsequently researched, as no talk or further edits were ever made. I believe that both the way in which this contribution represents the (admittedly popular) critical opinion(s) that it attempts to draw attention to, as well as the fact that it has carried a 'citation needed' tag for over five years on the article page, diminishes the credibility of Wikipedia's MP entry as a whole.

As mentioned above, this critique is, of course, often encountered in discussions of the Minimalist Program, both by linguists and non-expert observers in and outside of the professional literature. In the context of this article, however, without reference to particular work, it is largely of innocuous import to the reader, save for its potential to generate confusion and decrease the legitimacy of the vision for linguistic research that the MP reflects of Chomsky's scholarship. I am not entirely confident that it was added in good taste, partially because in six years no attempt has been made to discuss or find reference to it. Perhaps other Wikipedians would agree with the notion that this topic may merit the development its own subsection within the larger discussion section of Minimalist criticism. Many works are cited in this section, in which readers may find specific reference to the critique at hand. Whether it requires specific expansion and explicit mention is a question I leave open to Talk. Regardless of how this is or isn't achieved, if the original claim is to be included in the article, I believe that it should be representative of its role in the critical discussion of the MP as a whole and should be properly cited with specific reference to concrete, professional discourse.

In order to further substantiate the deletion, I quote the article that addresses verifiability and the removal of uncited material:

"The most important consideration is this: the ultimate determining factor should always be well-informed and sound editorial judgment that is consistent with Wikipedia policy, and results in the steady and consistent improvement of content for the benefit of Wikipedia readers. [...] Deleting a claim because it is inadequately cited is a decision that should be taken with consideration and care, and is not a call that contributors should make on unfamiliar topics."

– Matthew (talk | contribs) 02:35, 17 April 2016 (ET)

CP?? phases/phrases?

The article confusingly uses two similar abbreviations, vP and VP, for apparently different things, verb phrase and verb phase. And what does the unexplained abbreviation CP refer to? It says "see X-bar theory", but that doesn't even mention CP. According to CP and complementizer, CP means complementizer phrase, but the section Minimalist_program#Phases confusingly talks only about phases. --Espoo (talk) 22:28, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Relevance of Lakatos?

The definition of a program is relevant to this article but not so relevant as to warrant its own paragraph in the first section. It should be one sentence at most, and perhaps under a subheading regarding the MP's foundations. 71.178.19.78 (talk) 19:11, 27 September 2023 (UTC)