Is the Faculty of Language a “Perfect Solution” to the Interface Systems?*

This chapter explores the notion of perfection in language design and how simplification is essential to “perfection.” Through a selective history of syntactic theory (ending with Chomsky’s recent work), the successive innovations that moved toward a deeper explanation to achieve “perfection” in language design are discussed. Additionally, there is clarification of how the notion of “perfection” enters into the Minimalist Program and its efforts to reduce language and construction-specific rules to more general rules of UG, which in turn are subjected to 3rd factor (partial) reduction