A Comparative Study on English and Turkish Syntactic Structures within the Terms of the Minimalist Program

Abstract

The Minimalist Program with its economy principle highlights common mechanisms or necessary components of natural languages but overlooks linguistic differences or relatively trivial components in order to set universal grammar. In this study, we compared English and Turkish languages in terms of the Minimalist Program. The aim of the study is to represent Turkish language according to the principles of the Minimalist Program and to discuss how Turkish and English behave with regard to this concept. The study tries to introduce sample Turkish and English sentence and phrase structure analysis comparatively in terms of Minimalist Approach and thus suggesting solutions to Turkish particular differences in the scope of the Minimalist Program.