What was the broad question that you most wanted to get an answer to during your time in the program?

I didn’t actually formulate it in these terms when I came to MIT, but in retrospect, it was language diversity and formal variation that were the main issues that drove my curiosity. They still do replica watch.

What is the current status of this question? Has it been answered? Did it turn out to be an ill-conceived question? If it’s a meaningful question as yet unanswered, please tell us what you think the path to an answer might be, or what obstacles make it a hard question.

I think Principles & Parameters is still the best theory for conceptualising language variation although, paradoxically, we have a less clear idea today what those principles are and in what terms parameters should be formulated.

One idea that has gained ground, and which I think is right, is that ‘parameters’ are keyed to properties of functional heads or, more precisely, to the features that constitute them. So one might ask what features can do.

We know that features can be null or overt, attract a category or not, be interpretable or not, merge with another feature or not and perhaps a few other things. The options are limited.

What I suspect gives rise to language diversity is that these options have to be multiplied by the number of features which UG makes available. Here we arrive at the following questions: Of the properties that enter into human thought and belief systems, which ones are represented as grammatical features? This is an interface question par excellence, in my judgement and should be high on our agenda today.

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