Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Principles and parameters is a framework in generative linguistics. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Today, many linguists have adopted this framework, and it is considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics. The central idea of principles and parameters is that a person''s syntactic knowledge can be modelled with two formal mechanisms: A finite set of fundamental principles that are common to all languages; e.g., that a sentence must always have a subject, even if it is not overtly pronounced. A finite set of parameters that determine syntactic variability amongst languages; e.g., a binary parameter that determines whether or not the subject of a sentence must be overtly pronounced (this example is sometimes referred to as the Pro-drop parameter).