In linguistics, the minimalist program (MP) is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside

generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky. The MP seeks to be
a mode of inquiry characterized by the flexibility of the multiple directions that its minimalism enables.
Ultimately, the MP provides a conceptual framework used to guide the development of linguistic theory. In
minimalism, Chomsky attempts to approach universal grammar from below—that is, proposing the question
"what would be the optimal answer to what the theory of I-Language should be?"

From the mid-1990s onwards, much research in transformational grammar has been inspired by
Chomsky's minimalist program. It aims at the further development of ideas involving economy of
derivation and economy of representation, which had started to become significant in the early 1990s but were
still rather peripheral aspects of transformational-generative grammar theory:

- Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements, or transformations, occur only to

match interpretable features with uninterpretable features. An example of an interpretable feature is
the plural inflection on regular English nouns:*dogs. The word dogs can be used to refer only to
several dogs, not a single dog, and so that inflection contributes to meaning by making it interpretable.
English verbs are inflected according to the number of their subject ("Dogs bite" v. "A dog bites"), but
in most sentences, that inflection just duplicates the information about number that the subject noun
already has, and the inflection is therefore uninterpretable.
- Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose: the
structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on
grammaticality.

Both notions, as described here, are somewhat vague, and the precise formulation of the principles is indeed
controversial.[15][16] An additional aspect of minimalist thought is the idea that the derivation of syntactic
structures should be uniform: rules should not be stipulated as applying at arbitrary points in a derivation but
instead apply throughout derivations. Minimalist approaches to phrase structure have resulted in "Bare Phrase
Structure," an attempt to eliminate X-bar theory. In 1998, Chomsky suggested that derivations proceed in
phases. The distinction of Deep Structure v. Surface Structure is not present in Minimalist theories of syntax,
and the most recent phase-based theories also eliminate LF and PF as unitary levels of representation

In 1986, Chomsky proposed a distinction between I-language and E-language that is similar but not identical

to the competence/performance distinction. "I-language" refers to internal language and is contrasted with "E-
language", which refers to external language. I-language is taken to be the object of study in linguistic theory;
it is the mentally represented linguistic knowledge that a native speaker of a language has and so is a mental
object. From that perspective, most of theoretical linguistics is a branch of psychology. E-language
encompasses all other notions of what a language is, such as a body of knowledge or behavioural habits shared
by a community. Thus, E-language by itself is not a coherent concept, and Chomsky argues that such notions
of language are not useful in the study of innate linguistic knowledge or competence even though they may
seem sensible and intuitive and useful in other areas of study. Competence, he argues, can be studied only if
languages are treated as mental objects.

Language has been thought to be the object of linguistics. But Noam Chomsky insists that language is a
useless notion for linguistic science. He argues that linguistics should be concerned with grammar. He
renames language and grammar, externalized language (E-language) and internalized language (I-language)
respectively. According to Chomsky, E-language (language) is something abstract externalized from the actual
apparatus of our mind and I-language (grammar) is the physical mechanism of our brain. If we are endowed
with Universal Grammar (UG) at birth and get I-language after parameters built in UG are set one way or
another and I-language generates E-language, then I-language will be the object of linguistic science. But if
there is nothing but language (E-language) spoken or written around us and grammar (I-language) is regularity
derived from language (E-language), then we will have a quite different story. In other words, language
spoken or written around us will be the object of linguistic science.