Answer

Description versus explanation

Linguistic theory is nowhere near complete. The precise characterization of basic construction types such as passives, islands, existentials or possessives even within single languages is wide open, and there can be no doubt cross-linguistic descriptive work will continue for a long time to come. All that is in the absence of an agreement of what the overall descriptive and explanatory framework of linguistic theory should be, and in fact relatively little discussion on the issue of frameworks among theoretical linguists, who usually simply think of themselves as belonging to one or another particular school. Despite all that — and perhaps because of it — Minimalism centrally aims to transgress descriptive work in linguistics in favour of a form of explanation that is, in a sense to be clarified, ‘principled’ and that makes us understand why the apparent laws of language are the ones they are - in short, why things fall into the cross-linguistic patterns that they seem to do. Any such attempt will naturally involve a scrutiny of the question of what these principles have been taken to be, and it will also likely lead to a re-conceptualization of many of them, hence also to new descriptive work in the study of languages. Yet, it is worth emphasizing that the attempt is to ‘rationalize’ language more than to describe it.1

Minimalism, in short, is not a study of the facts of languages, but why they should obtain. So it is one thing, for example, to find empirically that human clauses, architecturally, fall into roughly three layers: the verbal layer (VP), the tense layer (TP), and the Complementizer layer (CP, forming part of the ‘left periphery’ of the clause); or that sentences demand subjects, an apparently universal fact of language, still largely opaque, which is captured under the name of the ‘EPP-principle'; or that locality is a crucial and universal constraint on grammatical operations. But it is a completely different question why all this should be so. This latter question crucially includes the question of how these and other structural facts are similar to those operative in other cognitive domains or else whether they are special to language, and why a language of this specific type evolved, as opposed to communication systems of many other imaginable kinds. It is in this way that Minimalism is intrinsically a project in comparative cognition and language evolution as well, in a way that no earlier incarnations of the generative project in linguistics has been.

This my answer