Van september tot december 2004 heb ik in Leiden de cursus Minimalism door Lisa Cheng gevolgd, waarin onder meer het nog te verschijnen boek
Understanding Minimalism: An Introduction to Minimalist Syntax door Norbert Hornstein, Jairo Nunes & Kleanthes K. Grohmann werd behandeld.
Het bevat de volgende hoofdstukken: The Minimalist Project, Some Architectural Issues in a Minimalist Setting, Theta Domains, Case Domains, Movement and Minimality Effects, Phrase Structure, Linearization, Binding Theory, Feature Interpretability and Feature Checking & Derivational Economy.
Soms boeiend, soms langdradig: de leukste hoofdstukken vond ik Linearization en Derivational Economy, wat wellicht te maken heeft met mijn belangstelling voor computationele implementaties...
Uit het Voorwoord:
"One problem students face in “getting into” Minimalism is the difficulty in seeing how the specific proposals advanced reflect the larger programmatic concerns. This book is our attempt to show why Minimalism is an exciting research program and to explain how the larger issues that motivate the program get translated into specific technical proposals. We believe that a good way of helping novices grasp both the details and the whole picture is to introduce facets of the Minimalist Program against a GB background. In particular, we show how minimalist considerations motivate rethinking and replacing GB assumptions and technical machinery. This allows us to construct the new minimalist future in the bowels of the older GB world and gives the uninitiated some traction for the exhausting work of getting to a minimalist plane by leveraging their efforts with more familiar GB bootstraps. In the end, we are confident that the reader will have a pretty good picture of what minimalism is and how (and why) it came about and should be well equipped to pursue minimalist explorations him- or herself."
