A minimalist program for parametric linguistics

Parametric linguistics may be viewed as a distinct subfield of generative grammar, or more generally of the abstract biolinguistic approach developed in the past decades of research, since at least Chomsky (1955, 1965) and Lenneberg (1967). It presupposes the crucial result acquired through this approach, namely that human language comprises a rich system of invariant innate knowledge, and concerns itself with the further problem of a formal and principled theory of grammatical diversity, a privileged testing ground for theories of the interaction between biologically shaped structures and culturally variable information. Such a subfield is minimally defined by three fundamental questions: