Principles and parameters

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Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles (i.e. abstract rules or grammars) and specific parameters (i.e. markers, switches) that for particular languages are either turned on or off. For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. Whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages (i.e. English is head-initial, whereas Japanese is head-final). Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Many linguists have worked within this framework, and for a period of time it was considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics.^[1]

Principles and parameters as a grammar framework is also known as government and binding theory. That is, the two terms principles and parameters and government and binding refer to the same school in the generative tradition of phrase structure grammars (as opposed to dependency grammars). However, Chomsky considers the term^{[clarification needed]} misleading.^[2]^{[further explanation needed]}

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So let’s talk about blueprints. There have to be plans for putting together a system, whether it’s constructing your band or an apartment building. And when we have something as complex as language, with all its delicate nooks and crannies, we all have to be using the same guidelines if we’re all going to end up in the same place. But do we? After all, there’s a great deal of variety to languages. The thing is, it turns out that when you set the right parameters, all languages are principled ones. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space. If you’ve been watching along with our series so far, you’ve probably noticed that we at the Ling Space are big fans of Universal Grammar, or UG. Under the UG view, we say that all people are born with a set of knowledge about how languages can work. This means that when babies encounter data from any given language, they can build up a linguistic system of their very own. But clearly, this isn’t the simplest point of view to take. It’d be easier to say that we all start off with nothing, and then we pick up how everything works as we go along, like learning the guitar or painting a picture. Back in our first episode, we advanced one argument as to why we support the UG theory: babies just get language too quickly, and make too few mistakes, to be starting off from the infant equivalent of some vast mental wasteland. This time, we want to come back and address another leg of this argument: languages are too similar for them to be growing unconstrained. Now, on the surface, any pair of two random languages, like Swedish and Japanese, don’t really appear to be that similar to each other. But these differences, under the UG view, are just superficial ones. If you peel back that top layer, and look at the wide variety of languages that we have in the world, you actually find a surprisingly small amount of variation. There are some rules that all languages follow. And when things do vary between languages, changing one small thing below can cause a big array of changes on the surface. We don’t need to encode into little baby brains nearly as much as you might think. That’s because there are two sets of things that UG stocks us with from birth. We usually refer to these as Principles and Parameters. Let’s start with the Principles. These are the rules everyone shares, universal properties that are true in every natural language in the world. We’ve already encountered some, like in our video about movement and traces in syntax: the idea that you always leave something behind when you move stuff around is true for all languages. But let’s dig a little bit deeper. Those tree diagrams that capture what we know about how sentences work? There are rules that govern them, no matter what language you’re talking about. Let’s stick with talking about moving around words and morphemes. For a simple sentence, like, say, “Nana heard Ren play the new song”, you could ask a question about almost any part of it. So you could ask, “Who did Nana hear play the new song?” Or “What did Nana hear Ren play?” And every English speaker would be fine with your beautifully formed questions. But we’re not actually free to just take whatever words we feel like and move them around to make those questions. Our system is subject to the principle of Subjacency. By this principle, some words are off-limits, stranded off on syntactic islands, from which they can’t escape. Other syntactic elements just get in the way, locking down that part of the sentence so that no one can get out. So let’s tweak our previous sentence a bit. What if we make it, “Nana heard when Ren played the new song.” Okay, that's simple enough. But can we still ask the question about who was playing, like we did before? Let’s try it: “Who did Nana hear when played the new song?” That’s... not good anymore. The presence of when there just stuck a padlock on who leaving that part of the sentence. There’s no escape. And that’s the same as for any language that moves its question words around. If your language does that, it obeys this rule. So if you put our sentence in German, the question would be just as bad: “Wer hat Nana gehört wann das neue Lied gespielt hat?” Or if you want to put it in French, “Qui a Nana entendu quand a joué la nouvelle chanson?” That's also super terrible. And that’s just one of the many islands Subjacency rules over. We’ve got some more about this in the extra materials back on our website, but for now, you probably get the idea. Our questions never break the principle of Subjacency. Every natural language obeys this rule, because it's part of UG. Now, it’s not just the ways in which languages are the same that are determined by UG, either. The way they differ is just as constrained by what UG has on offer. For all the huge variety of ways that languages look different, a lot of it comes down to making a choice between one thing or another. We call these Parameters. It can be useful to think of Parameters a bit like switches, You can just flip in your head when you’re learning a language. For example, do verbs get put before or after an object? Do sentences need to have an overt subject, or can we understand what we mean without one? Can a syllable have multiple consonants at the beginning, or are you stuck with just one? The switches are all there when you start out - they’re part of the mental framework you’re born with - but how you set them depends on the languages that are around you while you grow up. Let’s look at a couple of different Parameters UG gives us. So, when you’re making your sentences, maybe you want your verb at the beginning of the verb phrase, or maybe you want it at the end. So that’s the difference between “move to Tokyo” and 東京に引っ越す. Languages like English and Malagasy like to put the verb first, whereas language like Japanese and Turkish like to put it at the end. Cool. So there’s this switch that gets set depending on whether you’re learning Malagasy or Turkish, that determines how you treat your verbs. Fantastic. But wait! The amazing thing about parameters is, once you set one thing, a whole bunch of other stuff falls into place. So if a language places its verbs at the beginning of the verb phrase, it should do the same with all its other parts of speech: so nouns at the beginning of the noun phrase, adjectives at the adjective phrase, and etc. So “furniture from the vintage store” vs ヴィンテージの店からの家具. A syntax tree in Japanese will be pretty much the mirror image of one in English! Or, how about whether a sentence needs a subject? In French, if you want to proclaim your love for a certain auditory experience, you might say “J’aime la musique”. “Aime la musique” doesn’t mean the same thing, right? But in Italian, “Amo la musica” is totally okay. That’s because Italian just lets you drop the subject, whereas French and English don’t. And again, this simple parameter has some interesting consequences! Say you want to tell your friend Yasu that it’s snowing in London. You say, “It is snowing in London”. But if you want to impress Yasu with your rad polyglot skills, and break out your Italian, you might say “Sta nevicando a Londra”. In English, you need that “it” there, because you need subjects every single time! So even if you don’t really need one when you think about it - I mean, there’s no subject doing the snowing, right - your parameter doesn’t make exceptions. So it sticks a word in there that doesn’t even mean anything! It just can’t imagine life without subjects. Now, the Principles and Parameters approach is just one way of framing UG. There are also things like the Minimalist Program, which we’ll talk about in the future. But it’s a really good vantage point to start understanding how amazing human languages are, and how similar they are in spite of their surface differences. We could have way more variation than we do! That we all follow some basic rules, and don’t stray outside the lines, is some strong evidence for the innateness of language. Starting from when we’re little babies, we’re good at following the language blueprints. So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If our Subjacency violations didn’t break your mind, you learned that our linguistic system is defined by a set of principles and parameters; that principles like Subjacency are invariant rules that apply across all natural languages; that parameters are like binary choices about how your language can work; and that a single parameter can be responsible for multiple changes in how a language behaves. The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost, and it’s written by both of us. Our production assistants are Georges Coulombe and Stephan Hurtubise, our music and sound design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our website, where we have some extra materials on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Vi ses!

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

The Principles and Parameters approach is a postulated solution to Plato's Problem, as defined and stipulated by Chomsky. This program seeks to explain the apparent gap between linguistic knowledge and linguistic competency.^[3] In particular, given finite and possibly incomplete input, how do children in different linguistic environments rapidly arrive at an accurate and complete grammar that seems to exhibit universal and non-obvious similarities?^[4]

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. The problem is simplified considerably if children are innately equipped with mental apparatus that reduces and in a sense directs the search space amongst possible grammars. The P&P approach is an attempt to provide a precise and testable characterization of this innate endowment which consists of universal "Principles" and language-specific, binary "Parameters" that can be set in various ways. The interaction of the principles and the parameter settings produces all known languages while excluding non-natural languages.

Criticisms

Criticism of the P&P approach has come from a number of quarters, but with varying impact. These can be subdivided into three main groups.

Theory internal critique
The lack of consensus on a set of parameters
Inter-paradigm critiques not specific to P&P

Perhaps the most influential criticisms of P&P have been theory internal. As in any other developing field of enquiry, research published within the P&P paradigm often suggests reformulations and variations of the basic P&P premises. Notable debates emerged within P&P including (a) derivationalism vs representationalism (b) the locus of morphology (e.g. lexicalism vs derived morphology) and (c) the tension between a production model and a competence model amongst others. The development of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) and lexical functional grammar (LFG) reflect these debates: these are both strongly lexicalist and representational systems. Nevertheless, perhaps the most coherent and substantial critique of P&P is the Minimalist Program, Noam Chomsky's most recent proposal.^[5] 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. The Minimalist Program takes issue with the large number of independent postulations in P&P and either (a) reduces them to more fundamental principles (e.g. Merge, Move, Agree), (b) derives them from 'reasonable' interface constraints on derivations (e.g. bottom-up Merge and requirement that no derivation be counter-cyclic derives Relativized Minimality effects) or (c) programmatically suggests that they be either derived from more basic principles or eliminated subject to future research (e.g. Binding Principles). Note that there is debate about whether the Minimalist Program is motivated by the empirical shortcomings of P&P^[6] or whether it is motivated by ideological concerns with 'elegance' etc.^[7] (see main article on the Minimalist Program).

Aside from this major move within the discipline, it seems that consensus has not been achieved over a list of universal parameters.^[8] Certainly, there is no publicly available list of these parameters and textbooks tend to cite the same ones: the interrelated verb-movement parameters (V-v, V-T, T-C), noun-movement parameters (N-D), subject-related parameters (pro-drop and EPP) and headedness parameters. This is not to say that the theory has not been fruitful (e.g. Holmberg and Platzak’s comprehensive analysis of parametric variation in Scandinavian languages), or that the theory is not descriptively adequate, but rather that the accomplishments of this line of thinking have been less than anticipated in terms of explanatory adequacy. Particularly, a systematic, predictive system of parameters, their properties and interactions, along the lines of the periodic table in chemistry, has yet to be developed. Generally, theorists have moved to regarding parameters as varying feature specifications on lexical items within languages and derivations rather than parameters which are globally defined.

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 construction unit (e.g. a word, phrase, clause, sentence).^[9] 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.

Similarly, 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.^[10]^[11]^[12]^[13]

Other critics point out that there is little if anything that can unequivocally be called universal across the world's languages.^[14] Discourse analyses have focused on the dynamic, dialogic, and social nature of language use in social situations.^[15]^[16]^[17]^[18] These critics argue that P&P and discourse analysis differ in the same way that chemistry and cookery differ: one is the study of fundamental interactions at a micro-scale in a deterministic model that attempts to be scientific in the broad sense, the other is a more macro-scale, non-deterministic, non-scientific model focussing on use of chemicals in everyday situations in the real world. What these critiques have in common is the claim that the analysis of I-language does not carry over to E-language. From a Chomskyan perspective, this is a truism because the two objects of study are fundamentally different.

There is a tendency for inter-paradigm critiques to focus on a number of assumptions that are commonly associated with P&P, but which actually are common to Chomskyan generative linguistics as a whole. These include innateness, modularity, the poverty of the stimulus, language universals,^[19] binarity, etc. See for example, Connectionist, Functionalist and Cognitivist critiques. As another 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.^[20] Also, some have argued using evidence from historical linguistics that grammar is an emergent property of language use.^[21]^[22]^[23] Language evolution theorist, Terrence Deacon notes that it is 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. There are many more critiques. There is debate about the validity of these arguments, but since these are not specific to P&P they will not be dealt with here.

Examples

Examples of theorized principles are:

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

Notes

^ Newmeyer, F.J. (2004). Against a parameter-setting approach to language variation. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 4:181-234.
^ Chomsky, Noam (2014). The minimalist program (20th anniversary ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-262-32728-2. OCLC 899496765.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^ David Adger. (2003) Core Syntax. Oxford University Press. p.11.
^ ibid., p.16
^ Chomsky, Noam. (1995). The Minimalist Program. MIT Press, Cambridge MA
^ Holmberg, Anders (2000). Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18: 837–842
^ Lappin, Shalom. Levine, Robert. Johnson, David. (2000). Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18: 665–671.
^ Haspelmath, Martin. (2008). Parametric versus functional explanations of syntactic universals. Pp75--107 in The limits of syntactic variation. Biberauer, Theresa (Ed.) John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
^ Sacks, H., E. Schegloff, G. Jefferson (1974). "A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking for Conversation." Language 50(4): 696-735.
^ Chafe, W. L. (1985). Linguistic differences produced by differences between speaking and writing. Literacy, language, and learning: The nature and consequences of reading and writing. D. R. Olson, N. Torrence and A. Hildyard. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
^ Croft, W. (2000). Explaining Language Change. New York, Longman.
^ Kalmar, I. (1985). Are There Really No Primitive Languages? Literacy, Language, and Learning. D. R. Olson, N. Torrence and A. Hildyard, Cambridge U Press.
^ Thompson, S. A. and P. J. Hopper (2001). Transitivity, Clause Structure, and Argument Structure: Evidence from Conversation. Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistics Structure. J. L. Bybee and P. J. Hopper. Amsterdam, Benjamins.
^ Tomasello, M. (2004). "What kind of evidence could refute the UG hypothesis? Commentary on Wunderlich." Studies in Language 28(3)
^ Goodwin, C. (1979). The Interactive Construction of a Sentence in Natural Conversation. Everyday Language:Studies in Ethnomethodology. G. Psathas. New York, Irvington Publishers: 97-121
^ Goodwin, C. (2003b). The Semiotic Body in its Environment. Discourses of the Body. J. Coupland and R. Gwyn. Oxford, Oxford University Press
^ Heritage, J. (1987). Ethnomethodology. Social Theory Today. A. Giddens and J. Turner. Cambridge, Polity Press.
^ Duranti, A., Ed. (2001). Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, Blackwell Publishing.
^ Evans, N and Levinson, Stephen. (2009). "The Myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 32. pp429--492.
^ Larry Trask reviews The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker
^ Hopper, P. (1987). "Emergent Grammar." Berkeley Linguistics Society 13: 139-57.
^ Hopper, P. and E. Traugott (2003). Grammaticalization, Cambridge U Press.
^ Heine, B. and T. Kuteva (2007). The Genesis of Grammar: A Reconstruction, Oxford U Press.

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.

External links

This page was last edited on 8 November 2023, at 01:52

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