Chomsky’s linguistics: The goals of the generative enterprise

In order to provide a framework for evaluating the generative enterprise as discussed in Chomsky’s linguistics, which spans almost four decades—what has been and what remains to be accomplished—this essay examines the evolution of the goals of Chomsky’s research program into the nature, origin, and use of language. It compares the early goals, first formulated in the 1950s and revised less than a decade later in Chomsky 1965 and summarized in Chomsky & Lasnik 1977, with the reformulation under the minimalist program, focusing on the strong minimalist thesis, which motivates a search for principled explanation in terms of interface conditions and general principles of computational efficiency, the latter based on the operation Merge and a theory of phases. This evaluation develops some alternative proposals to the formulations in the volume under review.