Chomsky - Bare phrase structure英文书.pdf

Bare Phrase Structure Noam Chomsky MIT For a complete version of this paper (with notes and references) we refer to: Campos, Héctor and Paula Kempchinsky (eds.) (1995). Evolution and Revolution in Linguistic Theory. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. For academic use only. 1. Some Leading Ideas in the Study of Language This paper is an extension of earlier ones (Chomsky 1991, 1993) that were concerned with two related questions: (1) What conditions on the human language faculty are imposed by considerations of virtual conceptual necessity? (2) To what extent is the language faculty determined by these conditions, that is, how much special structure does it have beyond them? The first question in turn has two aspects: what conditions are imposed on the language faculty by virtue of (A) its place within the array of cognitive systems of the mind/brain, and (B) general considerations of simplicity, elegance, and economy that have some independent plausibility? Question (B) is not precise, but not without content, as in the natural sciences generally. Question (A) has an exact answer, but only parts of it can be surmised, given what is known about related cognitive systems. To the extent that the answer to question (2) is positive, language is something like a `perfect system, meeting external constraints as well as can be done. The `minimalist program for linguistic theory seeks to explore these possibilities. Any progress toward this goal will deepen a problem for the biologial sciences that is already far from trivial: how can a system such as human language arise in the mind/brain, or for that matter, in the organic world, in which one seems not to find systems with anything like the basic properties of human language? That problem has sometimes been posed as a crisis for the cognitive sciences. The concerns are appropriate, but their locus is misplaced; they are a problem for biology and the brain sciences, which, as currently understood, do not provide an