SIMPLICITY AND ECONOMY OF THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM (MP) AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

The study of language processing mechanisms is the main concern of psycholinguistics. It tends to study how word meaning, sentence meaning, and discourse meaning are computed and represented in the mind. In the 90´s, the Minimalist Program(MP) of generative linguistics whose main features were its simplicity and economy of representations was proposed by Chomsky. This program helped us to facilitate the establishment of a more fruitful dialogue with Psycholinguistics than the former ones since its main purpose was to reduce the computational apparatus of language. It is crystal clear that the simpler and more economical a linguistic program is, the easier it can be processed by the brain. Therefore, the contribution of the Minimalist Program to Psycholinguistics can be considered to be high. The present paper aims at highlighting some of the key characteristics of the Minimalist Program that lead into a simpler, more economical account of this linguistic theory and consequently the contribution of these two features into psycholinguistics.