Editing Minimalist program (section)

=== Strong minimalist thesis ===
Minimalism develops the idea that human language ability is optimal in its design and exquisite in its organization, and that its  inner workings conform to a very simple computation. On this view, [[universal grammar]] instantiates a perfect design in the sense that it contains only what is necessary. Minimalism further develops the notion of economy, which came to the fore in the early 1990s, though still peripheral to [[transformational grammar]]. ''Economy of derivation'' requires that movements (i.e., transformations) occur only if necessary, and specifically to satisfy to feature-checking, whereby an ''interpretable feature'' is matched with a corresponding ''uninterpretable feature''. (See discussion of feature-checking below.) ''Economy of representation'' requires that grammatical structures exist for a purpose. The structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality.

Within minimalism, economy—recast in terms of the ''strong minimalist thesis'' (SMT)—has acquired increased importance.<ref>For a full description of the checking mechanism see Adger, David. 2003. ''Core Syntax. A Minimalist Approach''. Oxford: Oxford University Press; and also Carnie, Andrew. 2006. ''Syntax: A Generative Introduction'', 2nd Edition. Blackwell Publishers</ref> The 2016 book entitled ''Why Only Us''—co-authored by Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick—defines the strong minimalist thesis as follows:

{{blockquote|The optimal situation would be that UG reduces to the simplest computational principles which operate in accord with conditions of computational efficiency. This conjecture is ... called the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT).|''Why Only Us?'' MIT Press. 2016, page 94.}}

Under the strong minimalist thesis, language is a product of inherited traits as developmentally enhanced through intersubjective communication and social exposure to individual languages (amongst other things). This reduces to a minimum the "innate" component (the genetically inherited component) of the language faculty, which has been criticized over many decades and is separate from the [[developmental psychology]] component.

Intrinsic to the syntactic model (e.g. the Y/T-model) is the fact that social and other factors play no role in the computation that takes place in '''narrow syntax'''; what Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch refer to as faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN), as distinct from faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB). Thus, narrow syntax only concerns itself with interface requirements, also called legibility conditions. SMT can be restated as follows: syntax, narrowly defined, is a product of the requirements of the interfaces and nothing else. This is what is meant by "Language is an optimal solution to legibility conditions" (Chomsky 2001:96).

Interface requirements force deletion of features that are uninterpretable at a particular interface, a necessary consequence of Full Interpretation. A PF object must only consist of features that are interpretable at the articulatory-perceptual (A-P) interface; likewise a LF object must consist of features that are interpretable at the conceptual-intentional (C-I) interface. The presence of an uninterpretable feature at either interface will cause the derivation to crash.

Narrow syntax proceeds as a set of operations—Merge, Move and Agree—carried out upon a numeration (a selection of features, words etc., from the lexicon) with the sole aim of removing all uninterpretable features before being sent via Spell-Out to the A-P and C-I interfaces. The result of these operations is a hierarchical syntactic structure that captures the relationships between the component features.