Theoretical Comparative Syntax

6   The principles-and-parameters approach

A comparative syntax of English and Japanese

1   Introduction

Since around 1960, constant efforts have been made in the theory of generative grammar to factor out certain general principles that govern rule application in the grammars of particular languages, attributing them to the initial state of the language faculty, i.e., Universal Grammar (UG), thereby allowing the rules of the language to remain in the simplest form. The extracted general principles gradually eliminated the need for rules of particular languages entirely, deducing the effects of the apparent rules in the sense that the interaction of these invariant principles yields the phenomena of particular languages which the rules were ...