Johns Hopkins University Ph.D., Linguistics, University of California - San Diego, 1987. Understanding the properties of this system paves the way to understanding and explaining the normal course of language acquisition. One key issue is the extent to which the adult system may vary across speakers of different languages. According to the Chomskyan view of Principles and Parameters, most principles are universal while a few are subject to a binary parameter fixed during exposure to a particular language.
All principles are inviolable.
Under this view, grammars contain well-formedness constraints on linguistic structure which conflict with one another. These conflicts are resolved by constraint ranking. In OT, cross-linguistic similarities are charcterized by the content of the constraints and the differences by the formal properties for the system. The key claim of this approach is that a grammar operates on the principle of optimization. Other issues of particular interest to me lie in the internal organization of a grammar, in particular that of syntax, morphology, and prosody.