on the other hand, steadfastly insisted that meaning was irrelevant. According
to Harris, when linguists like Lakoff and Ross pressed the importance of devel-
oping a method to bring meaning into grammatical theory, Chomsky’s re-
sponse was vicious:
[He] repudiated successful early work, proposed radical changes to the
Aspectsmodel, and opened ad hoc escape channels for those
changes—all on the basis of quite meager evidence—with no more moti-
vation, as far as anyone could see, than to cripple the work of his most
productive colleague and of some of the most promising former students
they shared. (p. 142)Eventually, necessity forced Chomsky to revise T-G grammar, reducing
the role of deep structure in determining meaning. Simultaneously, he in-
creased the emphasis on universal grammar and strengthened his argument
that language is an innate faculty of mind. Each revision made his conceptual-
ization of grammar, ironically, more abstract and more removed from lan-
guage itself. As Taylor (2002) noted, Chomsky postulated “entities and
processes ... which have no overt manifestation in actual linguistic expres-
sions” (p. 7). Thus, writing and language arts teachers are not likely to find
much in the revisions that is useful in the classroom.Principles and parame-
ters theory, proposed in 1993, represented a dramatic departure, in many re-
spects, from the grammar developed inSyntactic StructuresandAspects.
Over the next two years, Chomsky (1995) elaborated the theory and renamed
it theminimalist program(MP). Currently, the MP reflects his most fully de-
veloped ideas about language and grammar, although various linguists, such
as Kitahara (1997) have made minor modifications.
Understanding the MP in any detail requires a high degree of training in lin-
guistics, and even a bare-bones exploration would be well outside the scope of
this text. Nevertheless, a discussion of general principles is possible and can
provide a sense of what the program is about. The minimalist program is not en-
tirely new but should be considered a substantial revision of T-G grammar. That
is, Chomsky retained some T-G features and eliminated others, while in some
cases going in new directions. What follows is an overview.
The Language Faculty and Language Acquisition
The question of language acquisition is of special interest to those of us who
teach reading and writing. By the time children enter school, they have mas-
tered nearly all the grammatical features of their home language, and the ques-
tion of whether these features are mutable is important because home language
seldom is congruent with school language.
NOAM CHOMSKY AND GRAMMAR 183