Mind Design and Minimal Syntax

This book introduces generative grammar and asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen unites modern generative linguistics with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces Chomsky's program of a 'minimalist' syntax as a novel explanatory vision of the human mind. He argues that the design of the human mind is the product not of adaptive evolutionary history but of principles and processes that are ahistorical and internalist. Linguistic meaning, he suggests, arises in the mind as a consequence of structures emerging on formal rather than functional grounds. From this he substantiates an unexpected and deeply unfashionable notion of human nature.