Generative grammar is a divided field, one of the major arenas for argumentation being the nature of paradigmatic relations among words. The first attempt to address this topic was made by generative semanticists in the 1960s. Their proposal was that such relations are governed by standard syntactic principles which directly manipulate units smaller than words, with words themselves relegated to a surface phenomenon.

This ‘decompositionalist’ proposal met a reaction from the ‘lexicalist’ camp, on the basis not of the new theory's elegance, but of its factual support. Paradigmatic relations among words are in fact drastically less systematic, productive and transparent than would result from corresponding syntagmatic relations simply building up phrases. In the heat of battle, unfortunately, the important question being discussed was left unresolved, and each camp continued to pursue their line of reasoning, but the issue has become all the more significant within the current Minimalist Program.

This book makes a new stab at that question, from the perspective of the Evo-Devo project in biology, itself arguably part of an emergent field of complex-dynamic systems – to which minimalism can be seen as making a contribution. The line to be explored here is that both decompositionalists and atomists were right, albeit about two different developmental stages in the language faculty. To put this graphically, it was once common for natural philosophers to treat as members of different species creatures which were simply at different development stages.