‘Core’ and ‘Periphery’ in Historical Perspective

This article traces the changing fortunes of Chomsky’s concepts of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, from the beginnings of Government and Binding Theory in the late 1970s to the incipient minimalism of the early 1990s. Ten different characterizations of core and periphery are found in Chomsky’s work of the period, which alternatively questions the need for the distinction and promotes it to central theoretical status. Core and periphery are found to pertain to several different conceptual and phenomenological levels: universality, systematicity, typology, and historicity. Furthermore, they covertly recapitulate some of the oldest dichotomies of linguistic thought: nature/convention, analogy/anomaly, synchronic/diachronic, and marked/unmarked. The conclusions reached support recent changes in the theory which greatly reduce the prominence of the core/periphery distinction.