Minimalist Angst

I'm trying to write the introduction to a new monograph on Vietnamese: to do this, unfortunately, I have to make sense of current Minimalism. This is not easy, even for those more talented than I am, but—given that the subtitle of the work will be An Alternative Minimalist Analysis of Vietnamese Phrase Structure—I have no choice but to give it a shot. Here is an informal reflection on the topic, some parts of which I may be able to use:

'I must say that, like many people, I find a lot of Minimalist writing exceptionally dense. This may be for good reason—and it may just be too hard for me—but I have a sense that it's unnecessarily obscure and convoluted, and that much of the difficulty stems from two considerations: first, that Minimalism, up to 1999 at least, was a reductionist programme aiming to dismantle what was viewed as its too complex predecessor. Yet if the general spirit of Minimalism is correct, we shouldn't have gone there in the first place. Early minimalism reads more like a set of suggestions to Linux users on how to debug Windows 95. To which the appropriate response might well be: why bother? One possible reason is that this reductionism was early Minimalism's only real raison d'etre, and for many people this still seems to be the case: GB wasn't obviously broken on the empirical side of things, and certainly Minimalism has done little to improve or expand empirical coverage, so the main justification for it seems to have been an exegetical house-keeping exercise aimed at simplification for its own sake. (I'm reminded of a university friend of mine, now a distinguished philosophy professor, who dismantled a Mini engine, and put it back together in working order leaving out about 20 redundant components. He found this result immensely satisfying, as it may have been, but it didn't really extend his engineering knowledge, or come to that, make a better car: indeed, the redundancy may have been engineered in).

Leaving the analogy before it quickly collapses, I'll move to the second consideration as to why I think Minimalism is so hard, namely, because there is no consensus on which empirical facts it is supposed to derive. Indeed there is little consensus of whether it should have any empirical coverage at all with respect to end-state grammars. This uncertainty has had particularly deleterious consequences for language acquisition research, such that, as far as I can make out, no-one is doing empirical Minimalist studies of the acquisition of syntax. Rather, the language acquisition field has fragmented into two groups: on the one hand, those who continue to do GB-style acquisition, but call it "Minimalist" (as the new cover term for generative), and on the other, those like Stephen Crain, Andrea Gualmini and others for whom post LF-semantics is the new syntax. The uncertainty has also led researchers like Culicover (who I think makes some excellent headway in trying to cut to the chase, or better, finding some chase to cut to) to draw such distinctions as that between "Abstract" and "Concrete Minimalism". Personally, I'm not optimistic that Minimalism has a future in the language acquisition area until someone clearly spells out what it's supposed to do or explain. Moves, such as the ploy critiqued in Atkinson (2001), in which previously syntactic phenomena are dumped into PF (faute de mieux) are again reminiscent of the strong UG lobby in SLA, where mismatches between native-speaker and L2 learners were previously written off as due to processing errors or pragmatics. If it really has no empirical teeth, or even empirical aspirations, Mainstream Minimalism not likely to win over many voters in the long term.'

If you have any thoughts on this rant, please let me know.