The minimalist program in syntax

The Minimalist program, a development of earlier work in transformational generative grammar, proposes that the computational system central to human language is a 'perfect' solution to the task of relating sound and meaning. Recent research has investigated the complexities evident in earlier models and attempted to eliminate them, or to show how they are only apparent, following from deeper but simpler properties. Examples of this include the reduction of the number of linguistic levels of representation in the model, and the deduction of constraints on syntactic derivations from general considerations of economy and computational simplicity.