Principles and Parameters

How much do languages have in common underneath? Are there some rules all languages follow? In this episode, we talk about the Principles and Parameters approach to Universal Grammar, and look at some principles that all languages obey, as well as some parameters that offer a choice between two options for your language.
This is Topic #25!
This is also our 6 month video! Thanks for all your support so far.
This week's tag language: Swedish!
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Looking forward to next week!

[@janangelayala3239]

I wanna learn so much but that Nana shirt is just the highlight for me.

[@SkittlesJunkiie]

Dear Moti thank you so much for all the effort you put into your videos ! It helped me pass my SLA exam at University yesterday ! (I study for my BA in English in Germany) and SLA was not a field I was particularly good in. I will also use your channel to learn for Introduction to Linguistics and my Phonetics exam which come up within the next 2 weeks ! Wish me luck xx

[@thelingspace]

Thanks so much! I'll pass that along to the team, too. We really appreciate it. Good luck with the next set of classes, too! Let us know how they go. ^_^

[@rafaella3410]

You are so helpful! Thank you so much!!!

[@semp224]

Looking to do linguistics as my second major after majoring in Psychology. This channel helps a lot! Piques my interest!

[@samochud-ww1om]

I'm currently studying for my SLA exam and your videos are sooo helpful! Huge thanks!

[@sadafkhan1679]

Super informative as always....u explain every concept in a crystal clear way.... would u mind making sm videos on the concepts related to computational linguistics.....

[@theragie0986]

Could you please explain the locality principle/wh-movement and subject/null-subject parameters.

[@bblaairr]

Thanks for the vid. It helps me a lot.

[@maryamiqbal4022]

i want to learn more about this.. and would you please tell me about different theories of UG

[@nadiamira]

Loving the Nana references. Nice t-shirt!

[@thelingspace]

Thanks! It's one of the favorite shirts I've found for the show. ^_^

[@Pakanahymni]

This week's tag language: Swedish!

[@thelingspace]

Pakanahymni So ever since we started, the final little tag line ("see you soon / next week") at the end of each episode has been done in a different language. This week, we used Swedish, so the tag is me saying "Vi ses!" People had asked what they were for the earlier ones, so we've been adding it in. My accent... is rather a jumble, really. I was born in Illinois in the US, and grew up mostly in New Jersey, so I had at one point a more normal American accent. But I haven't lived in the US for more than a couple of months at a time in the last 10 years, instead living in Japan and Canada. So I've ended up with an accent where, generally speaking, Canadians think I'm American, and Americans think I'm Canadian. I wouldn't hold myself up as a particular shining example of any particular English dialect, at this point. To this day, I catch some of my phonetics / sociolinguistics friends with surprising pronunciations of things, given my background. ^^;

[@thelingspace]

+The Red Knight You're right that the Minimalist Program is a principles and parameters approach, just a different one from the one that we were discussing in this case. Should have made that more clear there. Thanks! ^_^

[@echikhimourad2429]

excellent work

[@thelingspace]

Thanks! Glad you liked it!

[@saras2254]

I cant understand the wh-movement !! is it always start with who ? or depend ? wh-movement means to move the closest one , but how ?

[@classyhoe94]

I found it interesting that even though languages may have a different order, their grammar is still set up the same. For example, in English, the verb is in front of the verb phrase whereas in Japanese, the verb is after the verb phrase. He stated that English grammar and Japanese grammar were practically reversed. Due to my hopeful profession in pediatric speech language pathology, I believe that knowing this will help in teaching children grammar. I think that this links to other course material because it deals with building a sentence that makes grammatical sense.

[@thelingspace]

+Celeste Hoeh Glad you found it interesting! And yeah, knowing the ways in which language can differ is definitely helpful for working with kids, particularly since kids are known to sometimes take detours through parameter settings from other languages over the course of language acquisition. Knowing about these changes can make it easier to figure out why kids do what they do. ^_^

[@sugarfrosted2005]

"and et cetera" I always found this cute. "And and others"

[@wasanshakir1203]

thanks

[@GregSanders]

Interesting, do tenses play a role in universal grammar or are they a higher level language feature?

[@thelingspace]

Greg Sanders This is, as with many of your questions, more complicated a question than you'd probably first think! I think the easiest way to address this would be to say that tense is indeed universal (and thus leaving aside people like the Hopi in the Whorfian view, that we talked about a few episodes ago in the one about linguistic determinism). But just because tense is universal doesn't mean that it's the same in every language. Different languages will mark for perfect vs. imperfect (so if an action is completed or not), habitual, near vs. far future or past, etc. But there should be some form of tense there. Hope this helps! ^_^

[@Sukoopurin]

I’m just here for the shirt

[@alimehraein6811]

I have got two questions. First, as far as I understand, you said that if the parameter entails that we put the verb at the beginning of a verb phrase we'll do the same with other types of phrase. Even in English, however, although we put the verb at the beginning of the verb phrase (as in "did my assignment") we do NOT put the noun at the beginning of the noun phrase (as in "a readable book"). So, is it not a counter example? The second question is inspired by the example I just provided. What is the exact distinction between a noun phrase and adjective phrase: is "a readable book" a noun phrase or an adjective phrase? Thanks in advance for your time.

[@julianb1831]

Are there examples of how much cross-linguistic variation there could be if there wasn't a UG?

[@MarcelloSevero]

In Italian you don't really say "Sta nevicando." The present progressive tense is rarely used in common speech, and it's much more common to just say "Nevica."

[@laurenttits459]

Isn't the minimalist program another principles and parameters approach? Great video by the way!

[@Tchikanii]

How he moves his head from left to right with every sentence, as if he is reading. Wow this is so complicated.

[@ebefl]

Chomsky rejects the P and P model in favour of the minimalist model..it happened in the 90s, and yet here we are with this video.

[@thelingspace]

True, and we have planned on continuing on to discuss Minimalism in the future, once we come back from our hiatus. But it's pretty common in teaching these frameworks to start with P&P and then show why that didn't work. So when we get back to it, that's the tack we'll be taking. ^_^

[@Dogsitter27]

Where is the minimalist program vid?

[@thelingspace]

+Hazmat Guy We haven't gotten to that one yet, but don't worry, it's definitely still on our topic list. ^_^

[@freeintellect]

@@thelingspace not yet?

[@frankharr9466]

I acutally don't have a problem with "Who did Nana hear when Ren played the new song". that just sounds like they want to know who was playing. But I could easily be wrong. Oh! I've got it. I'd misunderstood what the bad sentence was. Sorry! I am a fan of Preinciples and Paramiters, of course. Even if it's hard to spell.

[@nawwashere]

You sat that the 'it' in 'it's snowing in London' is unnecessary/ doesn't mean anything, since there isn't anything or anyone that is snowing, but I think this is incorrect. I believe 'it' refers to 'the weather', or 'the sky'. In my native dialect of Danish we refer to objects as either he, she or it, and when speaking about the weather we would refer to it as 'she'. In Old English you also referred to objects with the personal pronouns for he, she and it - perhaps the 'it' in 'it's snowing in London' is a remnant from Old English. Lovely video, keep them coming :-)

[@Pakanahymni]

I believe that modern syntacticians think it's just a "placeholder" subject because of the obligatory nature of having subjects in active sentences. I haven't watched the video yet though.

[@nawwashere]

Pakanahymni this might also be true. Thinking about it we also use 'det' (it) in the same way.

[@thelingspace]

Glad you liked the video! It's definitely true that different languages refer to these things in different ways. You correctly note that English doesn't have gender for nouns, the way it used to, or the way that Danish still does. As Pakanahymni says, though, the general sense among syntacticians is that when people use the "it" in "It is snowing," it really isn't pointing at the sky or some clouds, in the same way that if I say "There seems to be a problem with my guitar," you're not really pointing at anything with "there." But English requires that there be a subject, so we put one in, even if no pointing is happening. Something like the "it" in "I left my earring at home. It's still on the kitchen table." really points at something, whereas the "it" here doesn't. Such empty, subject filling pronouns are known as expletive subjects in syntax. Hope this helps! ^_^

[@catlover10192]

Could you give an example of something that no natural languages do that would be useful. A lot of the things that you've said that no languages do seem to be because they create meaningless tosh with too much ambiguity, or otherwise violate logic.

[@ArturoStojanoff]

Man, how many languages do you speak?

[@TheHila05]

same question

[@fenglinchen209]

He is a Nana fan

[@tammy5060]

i like ur shirt

[@lolimommy]

the nana shirt is so random

[@kha30s22]

But sign languages are totally different from spoken languages . Mostly in the order of words.

[@frankharr9466]

There are things I just don't understand.

[@sharkie115]

I think treating those parameters you mention as binary concept is way too simplistic approach. Let's consider SUBJECT/VERB order. You claim it's binary choice giving example from a few languages(English, French, Japaneese). In fact there is a third choice here. For instance in Polish SV order(in fact even SVO order) doesn't matter in terms of understanding a sentence. It's possible because suffixes in verbs and nouns give enough information about meaning. We use mostly SVO but it is only convention which can be broken e.g. in poetry or when you try to make something sound archaic or sublime. Little example: John went home. Jan poszedł do domu. (SVO) Do domu Jan poszedł. (OSV) Do domu poszedł Jan. (OVS) Jan do domu poszedł. (SOV) Poszedł do domu Jan. (VSO) 4 latter versions would be considered odd by most speakers but they're perfectly understandable.

[@salwanala95]

Sorry But you are so quick in displaying the information, I cannot follow you easily.

[@bhaelmountaser3788]

Slowly please, not all of us are Americans