Language acquisition and the minimalist program: a new way out

Abstract

Our aim in this paper is to show that Chomsky's Minimalist Program brings in a new way to conceive the Language Faculty and, thus, the Universal Grammar as well. Therefore, it opens up a whole range of possibilities for the language acquisition field. Explanations have to be motivated by virtual conceptual necessity: either through bare output conditions imposed by the interfaces, or through economy conditions of the computational system. Our point is that it should work likewise for language acquisition. If economy conditions play a role in the Language Faculty, then they must be important for the language acquisition process. If interface levels are essential for the Language Faculty, then they must play a role in the acquisition process as well. In order to pinpoint such issues we will discuss some evidence from the asymmetry between the child's initial production of subject and object in different languages. Our guiding hypothesis is that the basic syntactic relation that is privileged by the child acquiring a language is c-command.

Keywords

• Minimalist Program
• language acquisition
• c-command
• subject/object asymmetry