Principles and parameters

Principles and parameters is a framework in generative linguistics. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Today, many linguists have adopted this framework, and it is considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics.^{[citation needed]}

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.

Language acquisition

According to this framework, principles and parameters are part of a genetically innate universal grammar (UG) which all humans possess, barring any genetic disorders. As such, principles and parameters do not need to be learned by exposure to language. Rather, exposure to language merely triggers the parameters to adopt the correct setting.

Criticism

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Recordings and transcriptions of natural, everyday types of conversation show a different picture of what language looks like and how it is used. For example, while formal linguistics takes the sentence to be the canonical unit of analysis, conversation analysis (CA) takes the turn at talk as canonical. Speakers in conversation often do not use complete sentences or even complete words to converse. Rather, discourse is composed of sequences of turns which are composed of turn constructional units (e.g. a word, phrase, clause, sentence)^[1]. In CA, the form and meaning of an utterance is a product of situated activity- which is to say meaning is highly contextual (within a social, interactive context) and contingent upon how participants respond to each other regardless of grammatical completeness of an utterance.

Other discourse and corpus linguistic analyses have found recursion and other forms of grammatical complexity to be rather rare in spoken discourse (especially in preliterate societies) but common in written discourse suggesting that much of grammatical complexity may in fact be a product of literacy training ^[2][3][4][5]. Other critics point out that there is little if anything that can unequivocally be called universal across the world's languages^[6]. Whereas Chomsky and other formal linguists have painted language as a static, linear information transmission system, discourse analyses have focused on the dynamic, dialogic, and social nature of language use in social situations ^{[7][8][9][10]}.

Strong evidence from historical linguistics also suggests that grammar is an emergent property of language use^[11][12][13]. Grammars change over time, sometimes gaining in complexity (e.g. emergence of the future tense "gonna" in English; evolution of the triconsonental root in Semitic languages), other times becoming simpler (e.g. loss of Latin case system in French, Italian, Spanish, etc.). Most often, the structural changes to a language's grammar occur as the byproducts of other processes over the course of many incremental and accumulative alterations to existing structure (e.g. by a series of extensions of meaning of lexical items to new contexts which leads to grammaticalization). Hopper has referred to grammar as layers of the sediments of language usage (ibid.). In other words, grammars have historically emerged/evolved because of the interactions between accumulations of changes in language use (author's note: Perhaps this unpredictability due to historical contingency is one reason why there are so few -if any- grammatical universals.). Language evolution theorist, Terrence Deacon notes that it is logically problematic to consider language structure as innate, that is, as having been subject to the forces of natural selection, because languages change much too quickly for natural selection to act upon them.

Another source of criticism is the binary nature of parameters in the framework. For example, the linguist Larry Trask argues that the ergative case system of the Basque language is not a simple binary parameter, and that different languages can have different levels of ergativity.^[14]

The influence of principles and parameters is most apparent in the works of linguists who subscribe to the Minimalist Program, Noam Chomsky's most recent contribution to linguistics. This program of research utilizes conceptions of economy to enhance the search for universal principles and parameters. Linguists in this program assume that humans use as economic a system as possible in their innate syntactic knowledge.

Examples

Examples of theorized principles are:

• Structure preservation principle
• Trace erasure principle
• Projection principle

Examples of theorized parameters are:

• Ergative case parameter
• Head directionality parameter
• Nominal mapping parameter
• Null subject parameter
• Polysynthesis parameter
• Pro-drop parameter
• Serial verb parameter
• Subject placement parameter
• Subject side parameter
• Topic prominent parameter
• Verb attraction parameter

See also

• Government and binding
• Projection Principle
• Extended Projection Principle
• Theta criterion
• Poverty of the stimulus
• Tabula rasa
• Broca's area

Notes

References

• Baker, M. (2001). The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar. Basic Bks.
• Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Mouton de Gruyter.
• Chomsky, N. and Lasnik, H. (1993) Principles and Parameters Theory, in Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program (Current Studies in Linguistics). MIT Press.
• Lightfoot, D. (1982). The Language Lottery: Towards a Biology of Grammars. MIT Press.
• Musso, M., Moro, A. , Glauche. V., Rijntjes, M., Reichenbach, J., Büchel, C., Weiller, C. “Broca’s area and the language instinct,” Nature neuroscience, 2003, vol.6, pp. 774–78

External links

• Why Chomskean Linguistics is Mentalistic