Principles and parameters

Principles and parameters refers to a popular framework in generative linguistics. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by Noam Chomsky though many others have adopted the approach.

The central idea of principles and parameters is that the syntactic knowledge, or competence, of a person can be modelled with two formal mechanisms:

• A finite set of fundamental principles that are common to all languages, e.g. one proposed principle was that a sentence must always have a subject.
• A finite set of parameters that determines all possible syntactic variation, e.g. a binary parameter that determines whether or not the subject of a sentence must be overtly pronounced.