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This chapter discusses the kinds of work being pursued within the general principles-and-parameters model as well as some of the thinking that underlies and guides it. The theory of principles and parameters is a particular approach to classical problems of the study of language, guided by certain leading ideas that had been taking shape since the origins of modern generative grammar some forty years ago. The study of generative grammar has been guided by several fundamental problems, each with a traditional flavor. This chapter considers the two states of the language faculty, grammar and Universal Grammar (UG), the distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance, and the notion of “infinite use” in relation to competence and performance. It also describes structural descriptions (SDs), an infinite range of symbolic objects specified by a language, the conditions of descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy, and the levels of Phonetic Form, Logical Form, and D-Structure. Finally, it examines some properties of the lexicon, with particular emphasis on derivations and representations.

This chapter sets the work in its general theoretical context, introducing the central ideas to be developed in the following chapters—parameter hierarchies, and parameters as emergent properties of the three factors of language design—and briefly illustrates the way in which the principles-and-parameters idea can be maintained in current minimalist syntax by showing how the Final-Over-Final Condition (FOFC), taken to be a universal ‘principle’, interacts with and constrains cross-linguistic word-order variation (parameters). Whilst this is a classic case of ‘principle’ and ‘parameter’ interaction, both the principle and the parameter must derive from more elementary notions. In this way, we move towards a minimalist approach to principles and parameters, and to morphosyntactic variation in general. The Introduction ends with a brief summary of the topics of the chapters to follow.

One Cartesian reason for taking thought to be independent of language—or to have its own ‘Language of thought’—is that language is subject to massive cross-linguistic variation, while thought is not. So Chapter 5 addresses the issue of cross-linguistic variation: its dimensions, and its extent. Does it provide a challenge for our account of universal grammar? Not inasmuch as the primary dimension of variation is the organization of language at a lexical and morphological level; not, if what have traditionally been thought of as syntactic parameters actually reduce to variation in modes of externalization.

This chapter discusses the principles underlying the economy of derivation and representation. It begins by considering a range of assumptions concerning language design, with particular emphasis on the Extended Standard Theory (EST) framework, understood in the sense of the principles-and-parameters model. It distinguishes the lexicon from the language's computational system, the syntax in a broad sense (including phonology). It assumes that the syntax provides three fundamental levels of representation, each constituting an “interface” of the grammatical system with some other system of the mind/brain: D-Structure, Phonetic Form, and Logical Form. In accordance with the general EST framework, the three levels are assumed to be related to one another not directly, but only through the intermediary level of S-Structure. The chapter also examines some of the properties of verbal inflection, the separate syntactic status of Tense and Agreement, and whether both derivations and representations are subject to a certain form of “least effort” condition.

This chapter describes a Minimalist Program for linguistic theory that builds on the principles-and-parameters model and, in particular, on principles of economy of derivation and representation. It begins with an overview of some general considerations, such as the assumption that language is part of the natural world before turning to a discussion of language faculty and one of its components, a generative procedure that generates structural descriptions (SDs). It then considers Universal Grammar in relation to lexicon and a computational system, along with X-bar theory and the notions that enter into a Minimalist Program. It also looks at the level of D-Structure, the internal interface between the lexicon and the computational system, and the concept of S-Structure and its conditions. The chapter concludes by expounding on the economy principles as they apply to both representations and derivations.

This book proposes a minimalist approach to linguistic theory that builds on the theory of principles and parameters and, in particular, on principles of economy of derivation and representation. The minimalist framework takes Universal Grammar as providing a unique computational system, with derivations driven by morphological properties, to which the syntactic variation of languages is also restricted. This book explores the general conditions that the human language faculty should be expected to satisfy and the extent to which the language faculty is determined by these conditions, without special structure that lies beyond them. It also examines the conditions that are imposed on the language faculty by virtue of its place within the array of cognitive systems of the mind/brain, and discusses the general considerations of conceptual naturalness that have some independent plausibility, such as simplicity, economy, symmetry, and nonredundancy.

This introduction addresses the theme of grammatical description, mainly trying to clarify the notion of ‘redundacy’ in language; the discussion aims at justifying the fundamental assumptions of the cartographic program and in particular the large number of functional projections, whose hosts are assumed to lexicalize different basic features of language crosslinguistically

By its very nature, relabeling takes place in the lexical component of the grammar. By hypothesis, different theories of the lexicon should make different predictions as to the nature of the lexical items that are pertinent for relabeling. The aim of this chapter is to test this hypothesis by comparing the predictions of two different approaches to the lexicon—the Principles and Parameters (P&P) framework and the Radical Construction Grammar (RCxG) framework—for a relabeling-based account of creole genesis, on the basis of data drawn from a subset of Caribbean creoles and their contributing languages. The analysis shows that, for all the constructions studied in this chapter, the RCxG approach to the lexicon presents clear advantages over the P&P model with respect to the relabeling-based account of creole genesis.