ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the central notions of economy, including aspects of their history, motivation, modern form, and empirical content. There are two notions of economy: economy of representation and economy of derivation. As for the former, the goal is to minimize the theoretical constructs postulated, appealing only to those concerning irreducible lexical features, the products of their combination, and the conceptually necessary interface requirements demanding interpretability of representations. As for the latter, the goal is to deduce stipulated technical constraints on rules to independently motivated, ideally not linguistic-specific, principles of efficient computation. The single syntactic relation in government and binding theory, government, although unifying the modules and principles of universal grammar, suffered from a number of potential problems. Indeed, the strong minimalist thesis regarding syntax, phonology, and semantics might be encapsulated as computationally efficient satisfaction of natural interface conditions. The chapter also traces the development of the principles of local economy and of efficient computation.
