ABSTRACT
The first explicitly "minimalist" paper was Chomsky, but as Chomsky himself has stressed over the years, the Minimalist Program is just a mode of investigation, "not a theory". To understand this program, this chapter considers the Principles and Parameters (P&P) approach. It is the perceived success of this model to the central concerns of generative grammar that minimalism grew out of. Two well-known, and very serious, debates took place in the field in the late 1960s, whose resolution had such a powerful impact that it can be felt in the way P&P shaped up. Chomsky took the view that linguistics should care about describing what he termed "I-language", as opposed to "E-language". Although conceptually straightforward, this particular picture became simplified as interest moved from E-language to I-language. Chomsky distinguished three levels of adequacy for linguistic analysis: (i) observational adequacy; (ii) descriptive adequacy; and (iii) explanatory adequacy.
