Manual de sintaxis minimista

This book is intended for any student, researcher, or reader interested in the generativist view of language, from those who simply want to catch up on Chomsky's latest proposals to those who are intrigued by the implementation of a minimalist program in linguistic theory. On Wikipedia, minimalism is defined as "anything that has been reduced to its essentials, stripped of excess elements." It is usual to hear that label applied to very diverse activities (eg, music, architecture, painting or even decoration and cooking), but not to linguistics, or to any academic-scientific discipline, for that matter: there is no one minimalist biology, literature or mathematics. That alone should pique our curiosity, whether or not we are familiar with Chomsky and what he has said. Technical terms are introduced throughout the chapters, described and illustrated at relevant times, and listed in a subject index at the end of the book. The book consists of four chapters, roughly covering Chomsky's published work from 1993 to 2019, roughly a quarter century. The first of them outlines the goals of minimalism from a relatively general perspective and is therefore accessible to the general public. In the second, the modifications of the architecture of the grammar in the passage from the Rection and Binding theory to minimalism are presented, and, in addition, the basic computational operations, assembly and concordance are discussed. The third discusses the weight of one of the non-exclusive factors of language and its impact on its functioning: computational efficiency. To this end, the notion of "phase" is explored (Chomsky 2000 et seq.), which is nothing more than the updated version of Chomsky's (1977) "border knots" or Chomsky's (1986) "barriers". Finally, the fourth chapter is dedicated to linguistic variation (the "parameters"), to its characterization from the eighties to the present day and to those aspects that must be taken into account to study it from a minimalist point of view.