Abstract
Since Chomsky (1981), the principles-and-arameters (P&P) approach to Universal Grammar (UG) dominated linguistic research in many respects, including explanation in language acquisition. This approach contends that UG consists of a set of universal principles and a set of parameters associated with them, which have limited values. This formulation has been proposed and pursued in order to overcome the tension between the innateness of UG and cross-linguistic variation. On the one hand, since human beings acquire many aspects of language without the aid of negative feedback (cf. Crain (1991)), it is necessary for a theory of grammar to contain innate universal principles. On the other hand, since human natural languages display diversity regarding linguistic phenomena, a theory of UG needs to include room for parametric variation. Under this approach, child language acquisition could be viewed as a process of fixing parameter values, aside from the acquisition of lexical items (cf. Meisel (1995) for an overview of acquisition research along these lines)
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Fujino, H., Sano, T. (2002). Aspects of the Null Object Phenomenon in Child Spanish. In: Pérez-Leroux, A.T., Liceras, J.M. (eds) The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0291-2_3
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