The Strong Minimalist Thesis

This article reviews and attempts to evaluate the various proposals for a strong minimalist thesis that have been at the core of the minimalist program for linguistic theory since its inception almost three decades ago. These proposals have involved legibility conditions for the interface between language and the cognitive systems that access it, the simplest computational operation Merge (its form and function), and principles of computational efficiency (including inclusiveness, no-tampering, cyclic computation, and the deletion of copies). This evaluation attempts to demonstrate that reliance on interface conditions encounters serious long-standing problems for the analysis of language. It also suggests that the precise formulation of Merge may, in fact, subsume the effects of those principles of efficient computation currently under investigation and might possibly render unnecessary proposals for additional structure building operations (e.g., Pair-Merge and FormSequence)