From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: Chomsky's "Minimalist" paper
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 19:36:39 GMT

In article <hoeksema.5.711896611@let.rug.nl> hoeksema@let.rug.nl (J. Hoeksema) writes:
>
>
>Question to David: Is there then anything in this minimalist paper
>that IS new, exciting, or even halfway right?

New: yes, of course.  I did not suggest that the paper did not contain
new material, merely that the "shockers" that Schiller presented for our
amazement were interesting but logical consequences of proposals already
in the literature.  Furthermore, the consequences of the abandonment of
the LGB Projection Principle are necessarily tempered by alternatives
that yield similar empirical effects.

Exciting: That's a matter of taste. Read it and find out. 

Halfway right: Well, let's stop here for a moment.  Every paper in
linguistics, but particularly Chomsky's papers, is an assemblage of
different ideas whose connections to each other may vary in strength and
inevitability.  In the present case, although the different sections of
the paper are made consistent with one another, there are a number of
logically quite separate proposals in the paper, and one's judgment
about them can be similarly diverse.  Here are my first thoughts.

This paper explores a "uniform" theory of abstract Case that I find
unconvincing and probably wrong.  But that's me.  Read it for yourself,
why don't you?

It proposes a new view of syntactic derivations that eliminates
S-structure that I find challengingly interesting, refreshing and
perhaps right -- though its consequences are not fully clear to me right
now.

It proposes the elimination of D-structure and a theory of generalized
transformations to replace this notion.  Since, as I indicated, this is
a response to Larsonian shells, the motivation for this move will
probably rise or fall with the legitimacy of Larsonian structures
(unless new evidence comes in).  I have my own alternative to Larsonian
structures, so I am unimpressed.  On the other hand, there has always
been a serious lack of motivation for one choice or another concerning
the character of initial structures (e.g. the D-structure vs. indexed
S-structure debate), so it is not clear whether -- absent empirical
considerations -- one should prefer Chomsky's current view, Chomsky's
older view, Koster-Rizzi indexed S-structures, or some other idea.

It proposes an account of many Relativized Minimality effects as well as
other conditions on A-movement, head-movement, etc. in terms of a simple
conception of Economy that has complicated consequences.  A necessary
relaxation to allow his Case theory to work seems to yield results
concerning the distirbution of Object Shift in the Scandinavian
languages.  This is an impressive entry in a crowded horse-race, and I
cannot tell at this point where truth lies.  But it is surely
interesting, and at least half-way right.

It proposes a view of movement as copying that gets almost all the
reconstructions facts right without stipulation (for the first time),
but not quite all of them. So it's the best view of movement around, I
think, but still missing something.

So it's worth looking at if you're interested in the topics, yes.  It's
serious, responds to a huge amount of literature about a wide variety
of languages, and well deserves its likely position as one of a number
of hot topics in the coming year.  Right or wrong?  Neither, most
likely, as discussed above.

-David Pesetsky