Norbert to give Bloomfield Lecture

Celebrating "The Merge Hypothesis".

Wednesday May 20, 3:00-4:00, Norbert Hornstein gives the 2026 Bloomfield Lecture, hosted by the Linguistic Society of America, and convened in celebration of Norbert receiving the 2026 Bloomfield Book Award for "The Merge Hypothesis". The lecture will be about the issues in the book, summarized by Norbert below, and will be moderated by Jason Merchant. Registration is required.

he book has a dual agenda; one relating to identifying the core project of the Minimalist Program and the other outlining a Merge based theory that realizes this project in an empirically and theoretically satisfying way. Let me briefly discuss each.

The Minimalist Program (MP) is the latest stage of the larger Generative Program (GP). To appreciate  what novelties MP brings to the table requires seeing how it fits into the larger program. And this usefully proceeds by identifying the earlier questions that GP investigated and the theories that were proposed to answer these questions. One central thesis of the book is that MP builds on the huge success of prior theory and leverages this success to ask a novel question. To appreciate the import of this question requires seeing it how it fits what came before.

Two related but distinct questions motivated the first forty years of GP research: (i) whence linguistic creativity (the capacity a native speaker use and understand unboundedly many linguistic expressions) and (ii) whence linguistic profligacy (how can any child acquire any grammar in roughly the same way when placed in the appropriate linguistic environment). The answers are equally well known: Linguistic creativity arises (in part) from the internalization/acquisition of a recursive grammar that generates an unbounded number of meaning-sound pairings that the native speaker uses to interpret its linguistic environment. Linguistic profligacy is based on an internalized meta-capacity that humans share as a species-specific property to map Primary Linguistic Data available to the child inn an environment E onto a set of recursive procedures that generate an infinite pairing of meanings and sounds compatible with the finite PLD input. In short, the answer to (i) is the specification of internalized specific grammars for various languages L and the answer to (ii) is a specification of the fine structure of the Faculty of Language (FL), commonly called Universal Grammar. The book argues that these two questions practically speaking are logically sequenced with the potential fecundity of answers to the latter awaiting well-grounded empirical and theoretical answers to the former. Thus, decent answers to (ii) build on decent answers to (i).

The book argues that this holds pari passu for the central minimalist question.  The book proposes that the central minimalist question is why does FL/UG have the structure it has and not many conceivable others. This question is premature without candidate theories of FL/UG and it took the Generative Program about fifty years to develop some, the best-known being Government Binding Theory. The fine structure of this theory is the explanatory target of the Minimalist Program. The goal is to explain the axioms and generalizations of GB by deriving them from simpler more natural assumptions. 

With this background the book develops its positive theme; articulation of how the Merge Hypothesis, the primary theoretical product of the Minimalist Program offers an answer to the question of why FL/UG has the particular structure that the prior fifty years of research discovered it to have. I identify 30-40 or so laws of grammar and argue that The Merge Hypothesis can derive many of these in a principled manner from simpler elegant first principles that are themselves motivated by the larger Minimalist Program. In short, the Merge Hypothesis offers if roughly correct a plausible well-grounded empirical and theoretical account of why humans have the specific linguistic capacities they do. In effect, the Merge Hypothesis, building on the prior generative discoveries of the previous fifty years of research, offers an answer to the next obvious question that the great success of earlier Generative theory invites.

The book develops this argument in several steps going through the listed laws of grammar and showing how they follow from a particular conception of the Merge Hypothesis. In particular, following earlier suggestions by Sam Epstein and John Collins the book adopts what I dub The Fundamental Principle of Grammar which offers a very strong version of the Strong Minimalist Thesis. The claim is that all grammatical relations must be merge mediated. The book shows that this assumption is central to explaining the key identified properties of FL/UG.

This is the meat of the book. There is also a last more speculative part where it argues that Labeling, not Merge, is the fundamental linguistically bespoke innovation that allowed for the emergence of recursive systems of the kind we find in FL/UG. The book leaves this for last as it  allows those that don’t want to sign up for this claim to accept many of the earlier conclusions.