The Minimalist Program has advanced a research program that builds the design of human language from conceptual necessity. Seminal proposals by Frampton & Gutmann (1999, 2000, 2002) introduced the notion that an ideal syntactic theory should be Βcrash-proofΒ. Such a version of the Minimalist Program (or any other linguistic theory) would not permit syntactic operations to produce structures that ΒcrashΒ. There have, however, been some recent developments in Minimalism Β especially those that approach linguistic theory from a biolinguistic perspective (cf. Chomsky 2005 et seq.) Β that have called the pursuit of a Βcrash-proof grammarΒ into serious question. The papers in this volume take on the daunting challenge of defining exactly what a ΒcrashΒ is and what a Βcrash-proof grammarΒ would look like, and of investigating whether or not the pursuit of a Βcrash-proof grammarΒ is biolinguistically appealing.
The Minimalist Program has advanced a research program that builds the design of human language from conceptual necessity. Seminal proposals by Frampton & Gutmann (1999, 2000, 2002) introduced the notion that an ideal syntactic theory should be Βcrash-proofΒ. Such a version of the Minimalist Prog...