Minimalism 101
This could be defined as a list of operation applications or a chain of representations
What is a derivation?
This is the correct prescriptive term for the process of seeing an element of a clause out of its standard position, not invoking any theoretical analysis.
What is dislocation?
This type of theory for a language describes linguistic phenomena with a precise formal rule system, having a finite set of rules that create an infinite set of linguistic expressions.
What is a generative grammar (generative syntax)?
According to modern Chomskyan generative theory, this rule that connects two linguistic units into a bigger unit is most likely the only rule in the Narrow Language Faculty of humans.
What is Merge?
These are the three core syntactic operations in minimalist syntax.
What are Merge, Agree, and Move?
This is a construction from which extracting an element leads to an ungrammatical or marginal sentence.
What is an island?
This is the "footprint" that moved elements leave behind in their base position according to an influential idea about dislocation from 80s Chomskyan generative grammar.
What is a trace?
This is the claim that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language without innate language-specific cognitive biases.
What is the poverty of the stimulus?
This concept represents a property of a unit. Such properties could have a meaning, or they could not and trigger syntactic operations.
What is a feature?
This term is often brought together with movement to deal with long-distance filler-gap-dependencies, creating intermediate landing sites for the filler.
What is successive-cyclic?
These two levels of representation have been around since the Standard Theory. One is dealing with bringing together arguments and verbs and assigning theta roles (among others), the other one is a representation of the word order a construction actually has.
What are Deep Structure and Surface Structure?
This core property of language is only to a very small degree present in some animals and distinguishes meaningless and meaningful smallest units of language.
What is double articulation (duality of patterning)?
In this phrase, the agent argument and the predicate are linked, and it might or might not be relevant for the locality of movement.
What is the vP?
This thing tells us either semantically, morphologically or syntactically, that some element that has undergone movement stopped by at some point.
What is a reflex (of movement)?
The role of this language module was the main reason for the disputes known as the "Linguistic Wars". Former students of Chomsky wanted this module to be the center of language.
What is semantics?
This is the name of a gene that is found in many animals but its variant in humans is connected to speech and language.
What is FoxP2?
The Extension Condition (or a very strict interpretation of the Strict Cycle Condition) demands that derivations proceed in this direction.
What is bottom-up?
This principle bans extraction from specifiers and adjuncts, but not complements.
What is the Condition on Extraction Domain (CED)?
This is a rule that maps a deep structure to a surface structure.
What is a transformation?
This is the type in the Chomsky-Hierarchie that syntax of natural language needs to be at least, based on evidence from center-embedding constructions.
What is context-free?