Before I plow into actually trying to read the book on Chomsky's Minimalism, after having skimmed through the first few pages, I want to record my "before" snapshot: where do I stand in current understanding and/or lack-of-understanding of contemporary syntactic theory?
I last studied syntactic theory in the early 90's, when I was exposed to John R Taylor's book Linguistic Categorization, which for me personally was deeply influential. Because of that, though, I already find on page 5 of Understanding Minimalism (by Hornstein et al.) something I find deeply suspect: "[the Principles and Parameters Theory] now constitutes the consensus view of the overall structure of the language faculty."
Really? Maybe… if the definition of "consensus" = "what Chomsky thinks." Which is not, per se, beyond plausible. But…. although Chomsky is without a doubt a seminal and key thinker in the field of linguistics, I don't see him as infallible, nor do I see him as the sole source-of-truth. Am I being overly sensitive to what I have always perceived as an embedded authoritarianism in Chomskian syntax? Probably.
I have no quibbles with the principles and parameters theory, actually. It's scientifically trivial, in fact, as long as you leave open what those principles and paramaters might be. My personal "gut instinct," though, is the principles and parameters in question are not specific to a "language faculty" as Chomsky and his followers have always advocated, but rather instantiations of more general "rules of cognition" that are innate to the human brain by virtue of it's neurological anatomy and chemistry. Which is to say, language truly is "thinking out loud." This is not a totally naive view, but it's perhaps not part of the "consensus" in the field, either.
OK, out of time. More later.