Chomsky calls a 'Strong Minimalist Thesis' the conjecture that language is a perfect solution to interface conditions. The language faculty is thought to interact with other faculties of mind, including those responsible for articulation/perception and intentionality/conceptualization. That interaction determines crucial properties of linguistic representations. In turn, the linguistic system is seen as computational, and optimal in the derivation of interface representations.
The conjecture opens an obvious research program. To begin with, it forces us to rethink many notions that sustained the Principles and Parameters framework. For instance, we are not allowed to arbitrarily postulate levels of representations or give mere notational conventions a deep ontological status. More profoundly, if the linguistic system is computational, and optimally so, derivational dynamics, crucially sensitive to complexity, should be responsible for a variety of effects which were previously taken to follow from static primitive conditions.
Whether the strong minimalist thesis is tenable will depend on how well it explains the wealth of data that previous models accounted for, and how naturally it fits within the general enterprise of studying the human mind. The present research tries to undertake these goals within the Linguistics Department at the University of Maryland, as well as its Cognitive Science and Neuroscience program.
