Introduction. The Minimalist Program and the concept of Universal Grammar

This volume offers a collection of brief and orginal articles that aim at developing the minimalist approach to language. In this introduction, we would like to discuss certain issues concerning the Minimalist Program and the concept of Universal Grammar as well as to present the contributions of the volume. The term minimalism is typically associated to certain artistic tendencies whose work is said to be stripped down to its most fundamental features. In the linguistic agenda developed by Noam Chomsky and others since the early nineties, this term is endowed with the same aesthetic concern of searching for the most fundamental features of grammatical theory, but it crucially adds a substantive commitment to investigate to what extent language is-in a sense we clarify below-a perfect system