[2][further explanation needed] The central idea of principles and parameters is that a person's syntactic knowledge can be modelled with two formal mechanisms: Within this framework, the goal of linguistics is to identify all of the principles and parameters that are universal to human language (called universal grammar).
This leads to continual refinement of the theoretical machinery of generative linguistics in an attempt to account for as much syntactic variation in human language as possible.
The Principles and Parameters approach is a postulated solution to Plato's Problem, as defined and stipulated by Chomsky.
[3] In particular, given finite and possibly incomplete input, how do children in different linguistic environments rapidly arrive at an accurate and complete grammar that seems to exhibit universal and non-obvious similarities?
The problem is simplified considerably if children are innately equipped with mental apparatus that reduces and in a sense directs the search space amongst possible grammars.
The P&P approach is an attempt to provide a precise and testable characterization of this innate endowment which consists of universal "Principles" and language-specific, binary "Parameters" that can be set in various ways.
As in any other developing field of enquiry, research published within the P&P paradigm often suggests reformulations and variations of the basic P&P premises.
Linguists in this program assume that humans use as economic a system as possible in their innate syntactic knowledge.
The Minimalist Program takes issue with the large number of independent postulations in P&P and either (a) reduces them to more fundamental principles (e.g.
Particularly, a systematic, predictive system of parameters, their properties and interactions, along the lines of the periodic table in chemistry, has yet to be developed.
[15][16][17][18] These critics argue that P&P and discourse analysis differ in the same way that chemistry and cookery differ: one is the study of fundamental interactions at a micro-scale in a deterministic model that attempts to be scientific in the broad sense, the other is a more macro-scale, non-deterministic, non-scientific model focussing on use of chemicals in everyday situations in the real world.