From Minimalism to Cartography: towards a unified account 1 Silvia Martínez-Ferreiro and Meritxell Mata-Vigara Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona silvia.martinezf@uab.cat,meritxell.mata@uab.cat Nowadays more than ever, with the advance of linguistic research and its tendency to combine multidisciplinary approaches, the moment has arrived to face the structural representation of sentences as a powerful device capable to account not only for adult L1 data but also for child and impaired language. To fulfill this aim, the present paper attempts to provide a unitary account for Chomsky’s (1995ss) Minimalist program and the cartographical approach (Belletti 2004, Cinque 1999, 2002, Rizzi 1997, 2004 and much related work) considering some phenomenology for the different populations involved. 1. Introduction. We depart from the theory of linguistic competence provided by the Generative framework according to which human beings are endowed with an innate component associated to the language faculty, namely Universal Grammar (UG). It is a set of principles, some recursively applied, what determines the number and form of the grammar of human languages. The formal characterization of a language, i.e. the grammar, consists of two main components: the Lexicon and the Computational system (Chomsky 1995 and much subsequent work). The lexicon is a set of grammatical objects formed by a subset of features out of the total set of features that are universally 1 We are very grateful to A. Bartra, M. T. Espinal, M. L. Hernanz, C. Picallo, G. Rigau, J. Solà and the audiences of the CISCL and the WoSS 07 especially to L. Rizzi for their comments on previous versions of this paper. All remaining errors are our own. This work has been supported by grants 2005SGR00753 from the Generalitat de Catalunya and HUM2006-13295-C02-01 from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. 1