Quotes from Minimalist papers

Disclaimer: The following quotations are highly biased with respect to their amusement value. The webmistress of this site does not consider herself to be in possession of sufficient knowledge to ascertain that the quotations below do not in fact reflect the actual nature of the phenomena they discuss.

Brave New Speak: What do you say when...

You're writing the Minimalist Program for the Linguistic Theory and it happens that...

Your theory predicts the opposite of the observed effect
        p. 333: "We are left with some unclarity about the proper idealization of the data with extraneous factors removed."

Your theory predicts the wrong order of elements
        p. 368: "The best answer would be that the order is really (205a) throughout the <...> computation. <...> We thus take the output to be really (205a), irrespective of what is observed at the PF output" 

Your theory has troubles addressing certain operations
        p. 325: "the core computational properties we have considered differ markedly in character from many other operations of the language faculty, and it may be a mistake to try to integrate them within the same framework of principles."

Your theory wants to be unambiguous, but you're not sure
        p. 252: "Chains are unambiguously determined in this way. \ It may, however, be correct to allow a certain ambiguity."

You proceed with the Minimalist Inquiries and...
(courtesy of the minimalist modalist Jonny Butler):

You don't want to get into the boring details:

p.106: "The process continues until it terminates"
 

In order to preemptively counter inevitable criticism:

p.113: "It is hardly necessary to observe that all of this is highly unlikely. There is substantial empirical evidence supporting the opposite conclusion at every point."

You'd rather not be too specific:

p.119: "I will assume some instantiation of this array of options to be correct"

The same guiding principles are followed in Beyond Explanatory Adequacy,
which also specifies the correct ways of describing the situation if... (page numbers according to the ms.):

Your theory and your data have little in common:
        p. 7: "This version of IC is reasonable: let us adopt it -- noting, however, that it is by no means easy to satisfy and is often violated in practice, even when adopted as a general principle."

You want your theory to conform to some principle, but then it doesn't account for the data:
        p. 10: "The thesis conforms to SMT, but faces serious empirical challenge."

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