Framework
The central idea of principles and parameters is that a person's syntactic knowledge can be modelled with two formal mechanisms:
- A finite set of fundamental principles that are common to all languages; e.g., that a sentence must always have a subject, even if it is not overtly pronounced.
- A finite set of parameters that determine syntactic variability amongst languages; e.g., a binary parameter that determines whether or not the subject of a sentence must be overtly pronounced (this example is sometimes referred to as the Pro-drop parameter).
Within this framework, the goal of linguistics is to identify all of the principles and parameters that are universal to human language (called: Universal Grammar). As such, any attempt to explain the syntax of a particular language using a principle or parameter is cross-examined with the evidence available in other languages. This leads to continual refinement of the theoretical machinery of generative linguistics in an attempt to account for as much syntactic variation in human language as possible.
Read more about this topic: Principles And Parameters
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