Talk:Principles and parameters

message: The article says «Today, many linguists have adopted this framework, and it is considered the dominant form of mainstream linguistics.». I have the impression that this would have been an accurate statement back in 1995, and that a better formulation would be «Many linguists adopted this framework in the eighties, and it was considered the dominant form of mainstream linguistics until it was replaced by Minimalism in the mid-nineties.» Trondtr 20:03, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The article for generative grammar indicates that P&P is inclusive of both G&B and Minimalism, so if the wording here is to be changed to indicate that Minimalism is dominant, it should be changed there. Before this happens, it should be checked with outside sources whether P&P includes Minimalism or not. -Space Dracula 16:21, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dominant 

message: This section seems highly biased to me, and is of a similar writing style to and many of the same ideas of a pragraph in the Syntax article, which I criticized and commented out with consent from others.  The user who added this section, who also seems to have a preoccupation with Broca's area, seems to have failed to include summaries in doing large edits on several occasions, disrupting proper criticism of additions on articles such as these, which so rarely get updated; on a similar note, this article also refers readers to the oft-mentioned Broca's area article for references.  More importantly, however, these edits contain strongly-worded, biased information that tends to be tagged to cite references.  While I think it's important to address relationships between the theory of Universal Grammar, which is predicated upon making claims about the brain, it's still a fundamentally good idea to avoid language that presents ideas promoted within a certain theoretical dogma as if they were objective facts.  For example, the sentence "By using neuroimaging techniques it has been recently proved that Broca's area - a portion of the left inferior frontal part of the human brain-reacts selectively to all and only those languages that follow Universal Grammar" to me implies that the author is asserting that Universal Grammar is objectively proven to be true.  This should not be worded this way, and is also redundant with the better-worded, cited section Grammar and the brain in the Universal Grammar article.  As such it should not be in this article, one dealing with a specific UG theory, when it's covered in an article that deals more explicitly with its subject in a much more acceptable way.  I think it should be deleted, but for now I'm going to comment it out.  Thoughts? -Space Dracula 16:46, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The section should be deleted as it doesn't discuss p&p directly and is only tangentially relevant to this article. An article on Grammar and the brain would be very interesting. I have a number of papers lying around here somewhere on "grammatical aphasia" that I could dig out. - Francis Tyers · 07:17, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

text: I also agree that it's inappropriate for this article, since the P&P program didn't really lead to any work on the brain in itself. I.e., lots of people studied the brain because they were interested in the general UG hypothesis, but not so much its specific P&P realization. Cadr 11:36, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

text: I agree with the edit that removed this section.  I'm also removing the citation to an article about Broca's area down at the bottom, which is no longer referred to in the article.  I'm assuming it came from the now-deleted section. Mcswell (talk) 16:48, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Universal Grammar and the Brain 

message: As a result of this comment, I moved Extended projection principle and Projection principle to Extended Projection Principle and Projection Principle, respectively. The first page of google hits supports the initial comment: all use Title Capitalization Style for EPP. But now I see that we have lots of similar pages, so it'd be good to be consistent and also correct. I'm no linguistic expert and I don't have any of the cited refs handy, so what's the correct way here? DMacks (talk) 16:55, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe the issue is the Wikipedia policy for naming articles. It says that articles should only have the first word capitalized. My personal opinion is I’ve always thought that policy was kind of weird but we should follow policies even if we don’t agree with them. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 23:11, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Capitalization of names of principles 

message: The nativism called "universal grammar" actually predicts that adaptation to different languages should, by natural selection, have produced groups of humans genetically incapable of learning foreign languages. That racist prediction have been conclusively disproved in lots of studies. Avoiding falsifiability by avoiding extrapolation of theories to their logical extremes is not scientific at all. Furthermore, there is no way to explain why a vast range of redundant linguistic capacities obviously not needed to build a complex language (no language uses the whole worldwide range and some languages only use a very small fraction of it) should have evolved in the first place. This is explained in more detail on the pages "Brain" and "Origin of language" (and to some extent "Piraha"), all on Pure science Wiki, a wiki devoted to the pure scientific method unaffected by academic obsession with status and prestige.
95.209.8.118 (talk) 13:42, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  The theory makes absurd predictions. 

message: The intro of the article currently says: “Principles and parameters as a grammar framework is also known as government and binding theory.” I think this is wrong. The two are highly related, I believe that the principles are mostly or completely defined using government binding theory but the two theories are not the same. Government binding theory is an attempt to simplify the complex transformations required in previous approaches by viewing all phrases (noun phrase, verb phrase, etc.) as examples of the general concept of a phrase with aspects such as the head of the phrase. P&P is the claim that all natural languages can be described by a small set of principles and various (related) Parameters (e.g., head first vs. head last) of those principles. They are highly related but not the same. This is clearer in the subsequent text: “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)” but I think that sentence that they are the same is wrong and should be changed. If anyone disagrees please reply, if no one comments I will change this. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 22:59, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  P&P vs. Government Binding theory