ABSTRACT
The human capacity to acquire knowledge of language and to use it in speaking, understanding and thinking distinguishes us from all other members of the animal kingdom. Language study in this biological sense was introduced by Noam Chomsky in 1955 and has revolutionized the field of language study as a branch of human bio-cognitive psychology or biolinguistics. This chapter explores to determine the nature of such rule systems has been and remains the goal of syntactic research throughout the modern era; rule systems provide the basis for the notion derivation. Specific to syntax, Chomsky distinguishes derivational procedures from representational ones. The Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT) regarding the human language faculty can be succinctly stated as computationally efficient satisfaction of the bare output conditions by simple rules. In the advent of the minimalist program, postulation of linguistic levels beyond conceptual necessity was taken to be a departure from the SMT.
