Economy against prescriptivism: internal and expernal factors of language cha…

This paper provides a short overview of some principles of the Minimalist Program, as originally outlined in Chomsky (1995). Within this framework, sentences are constructed in as economic a way as possible, e.g. movement is restricted. I formulate a few of these economy principles more precisely (the Head Preference Principle and the Late Merge Principle) and then go on to examine several case…