MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

550 Minimum Description Length
Economy, in the form of “Shortest Move,” selects (4) over
(5) because the sentence-initial interrogative position
“needs” a Wh-expression, and is closer to the subject than it
is to the object. Many of the movement constraints falling
under the Relativized Minimality Constraint of Rizzi (1990)
are susceptible to a parallel analysis. This constraint, which
had an important impact on the developing Minimalist Program,
forbids movement to a position of a certain type: head
position, A(rgument type)-position, A' (non-A)-position
across an intervening position of the same type. Within the
minimalist approach, the effects of this constraint are taken
to fall under general economy constraints on derivation.
Theoretical developments in the minimalist direction,
many well before minimalism was formulated as a program,
have generally led to greater breadth and depth of understanding.
Thus there is reason to expect that the Minimalist
Program may eventually give rise to an articulated theory of
linguistic structure, one that can resolve the traditional tension
in linguistic theory between descriptive adequacy (the
need to account for the phenomena of particular languages)
and explanatory adequacy (the goal of explaining how linguistic
knowledge arises in the mind so quickly and on the
basis of such limited evidence).
See also HEAD MOVEMENT; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR; PARAMETER-SETTING APPROACHES
TO ACQUISITION, CREOLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY
—Howard Lasnik
References
Chomsky, N. (1955). The logical structure of linguistic theory.
Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Revised 1956 version published in part by Plenum Press, New
York (1975) and by University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
(1985).
Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1973). Conditions on transformations. In S. Anderson
and P. Kiparsky, Eds., A Festschrift for Morris Halle. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 232–286.
Chomsky, N. (1980). On binding. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 1–46.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht:
Foris.
Chomsky, N. (1982). Some Concepts and Consequences of the
Theory of Government and Binding. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Chomsky, N., and H. Lasnik. (1993). The theory of principles and
parameters. In J. Jacobs, A. von Stechow, W. Sternefeld, and T.
Vennemann, Eds., Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary
Research, vol. 1. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 506–
569. Reprinted in Chomsky (1995).
Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Further Readings
Abraham, W., S. D. Epstein, H. Thráinsson, and C. Jan-Wouter
Zwart, Eds. (1996). Minimal Ideas: Syntactic Studies in the
Minimalist Framework. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Boskovi éc , Z.
(1997). The Syntax of Nonfinite Complementation:
An Economy Approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Collins, C. (1997). Local Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Freidin, R. (1997). Review of Noam Chomsky. The Minimalist
Program, Language 73:571–582.
Kayne, R. S. (1994). The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Kitahara, H. (1997). Elementary Operations and Optimal Derivations.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lasnik, H. (1993). Lectures on minimalist syntax. University of
Connecticut Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 1. Storrs: University
of Connecticut.
Lasnik, H., and M. Saito. (1991). On the subject of infinitives. In
L. M. Dobrin, L. Nichols, and R. M. Rodriguez, Eds., Papers
from the Twenty-seventh Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic
Society. Pt. 1, The General Session. Chicago: Chicago
Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, pp. 324–343.
Lasnik, H., and J. Uriagereka. (1988). A Course in GB Syntax:
Lectures on Binding and Empty Categories. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Uriagereka, J. (1998). Rhyme and Reason: An Introduction to Minimalist
Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Watanabe, A. (1996). Case Absorption and WH-Agreement. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Zwart, C. J.-W. (1997). Morphosyntax of Verb Movement. A Minimalist
Approach to the Syntax of Dutch. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Minimum Description Length
Minimum message length (MML) is a criterion for comparing
competing theories about, or inductive inferences from,
a given body of data. A very similar criterion, also to be
described, is minimum description length (MDL). The basic
concept behind both criteria is an operational form of
Occam’s razor (see PARSIMONY AND SIMPLICITY). A “good”
theory induced from some data should enable the data to be
encoded briefly. In human terms, a good theory introduces
concepts, assumptions, and inference rules or “laws” that, if
taken as true, allow much of the data to be deduced.
For example, suppose the data to be measurements of the
forces applied to several physical bodies, and their resulting
accelerations, where each body is subjected to a number of
experiments using different forces. If we propose the concept
that each body has a “mass,” and the law that acceleration
is given by force divided by mass, then the given data
may be restated more briefly. If for each body, we state an
assumed value for its mass, then for each experiment on that
body we need only state the applied force because its acceleration
can then be deduced. In practice, matters are a little
more complicated: we cannot expect the measured acceleration
in each case to equal the deduced value exactly because
of inaccuracies of measurement (and because our proposed
“law” is not quite right). Thus, for each experiment, the
restatement of the data must include a statement of the small
amount by which the measured acceleration differs from the
deduced value, but if these corrections are sufficiently
small, writing them out will need much less space than writing
out the original data values.
Note that the restated data are unintelligible to a reader
who does not know the “law” we have induced and the body
masses we have estimated from the original data. Thus we