Keele Research Repository

The history of generative linguistics is a history of a tension between, on the one hand, incorporating all the complexity suggested by detailed descriptions of natural languages and the innate knowledge humans bring to the task of acquisition, and on the other the sparsity that seems to be forced on such innate contributions by developmental and evolutionary biology and psychology. In this paper I describe these pressures in detail, and then outline the strategy currently adopted by ‘Minimalist’ linguistic theorizing, which involves deriving the complexity of linguistic competence from an underlying simple system. I close with some remarks on the remaining difficulties and prospects for such an explanatory strategy.