THE PARAMETRIC VARIATIONS OF ENGLISH AND KANURI NOUN PHRASES: A MINIMALIST APPROACH

This paper examines the parametric variations of English and Kanuri noun phrases (NPs) within the theoretical framework of Principles and Parameters (P&P), and the study adopts Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist Approach (MA). In conducting the research, the researcher uses his native intuition to collect the data for this study. The secondary sources of data involve the use of three competent native speakers to validate the data. The outcome of the study reveals that there are differences and similarities between the two languages which are genetically different –Kanuri Nilo is a Saharan language while English is an Endo European language. The differences are: Kanuri is a head final language while English is head initial language. On the complement phrases, the two languages share dissimilarities –quantifiers and adjectives occur post head in Kanuri while the quantifiers and adjectives occur pre-head in English. Finally, the two languages share similarities in terms of noun plural formation morphologically suffixed to post head nouns and definiteness and agreement features [-Def] [+PL Num].

Review of the English Tense System: Decoding Dichotomies and Restructuring Instructional Practice

As far as the main purpose of teaching and learning of the Grammar of a language is concerned, it should tell the teachers and learners the principles and parameters of sentence construction in the given language, i.e. English Language in the context of the discussion in this paper. Incidentally, the grammatical device of tense becomes more important and relevant at the level of discourse and communication. However, a predominantly common approach to teaching and learning of the system of tense in English language has been to understand it in synonymous terms with the notion of three timelines of present, past and future, which poses situations of systemic difficulties and makes it confusing and misleading to comprehend and communicate sentences and utterances in terms of communicative clarity within the parametric confines of the linguistic system of the English Language. Focusing on this issue, this paper demonstrates the ways to unfold the dichotomies involved in the traditional ways of teaching and learning of the grammar of tense, times and aspects of verbal action in English Language and suggests an instructional framework to resolve the related pedagogical issues of concern.

The Basics of Generative Grammars

This chapter offers explanations of some basic technical terms, and a sketch of the historical developments and continuity of Chomskyan theories: the early formal presentations; the 1965 Aspects model; issues about generative semantics, “Autonomy of Syntax” and what I call “teleotyranny”; the Principles and Parameters model; the Minimalist Program; and Chomsky’s “Third Factor” neural and evolutionary speculations. All of these developments should be regarded as they were always intended, not as finished theories, but as the development of increasingly deep and rich strategies for explaining the crucial data. The chapter concludes with two relatively simple, representative explanations: the constraints on negative polarity items (NPIs) and on binding.

The English Translation of the Quranic Text: The Structural Asymmetries

The structural patterns that results from the translation of the Quran are some of the issues that have been widely studied (El-imam, 2013; Al-Amri, 2015). The current study, however, illustrates the pervasive syntactic asymmetries in the syntactic output of the translated Quranic text into English. Most translators shift from the word order in Arabic to word order in English to establish a grammatical equivalence between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) with little consideration of the syntactic typological significance of Arabic as a source language and English as a target one. This study aims to determine the mismatch of the grammatical functions and the syntactic typology of TL vis-à-vis ST. Word order, tense shift, case asymmetry, Ellipsis, passive structures, selectional restrictions and cross formations are some of the grammatical issues that illustrate the syntactic asymmetries in the English translation adopted in this paper. The findings show that different grammatical categories exhibit syntactic asymmetries that would distort the implications or exegesis of the original ST. The findings also suggest that the English version of the translation adopted in this paper needs to be structured according to Chomsky’s (1981) principles and parameters demonstrated by the Arabic structure before the translation task is carried out.

Introduction

This chapter sets the work in its general theoretical context, introducing the central ideas to be developed in the following chapters—parameter hierarchies, and parameters as emergent properties of the three factors of language design—and briefly illustrates the way in which the principles-and-parameters idea can be maintained in current minimalist syntax by showing how the Final-Over-Final Condition (FOFC), taken to be a universal ‘principle’, interacts with and constrains cross-linguistic word-order variation (parameters). Whilst this is a classic case of ‘principle’ and ‘parameter’ interaction, both the principle and the parameter must derive from more elementary notions. In this way, we move towards a minimalist approach to principles and parameters, and to morphosyntactic variation in general. The Introduction ends with a brief summary of the topics of the chapters to follow.

Parameters

This chapter begins by summarizing recent critiques of the principles-and-parameters approach to cross-linguistic variation. It then sets out the explanatory advantages of that approach as they were originally envisaged in the early 1980s, arguing that these are advantages worth retaining. The nature of the empirical challenge posed by cross-linguistic variation is illustrated by a detailed summary of what is known regarding variation of different kinds across the (mainly Italo-)Romance languages, and then by illustrating the fundamental typological unity of these languages by comparing them with Japanese. What further emerges is that many of the properties subject to variation in Romance have no counterparts at all in Japanese, seemingly calling into question the universal nature of parameters. This leads to the development of a four-way typology of parameters as macro-, meso-, micro-, and nanoparameters and the associated hierarchical structure of variation (whereby macro- and mesochoices close off possibilities for microvariation).

Chomsky's Contribution to Linguistics: A Review

This review seeks to highlight Chomsky's major contributions to the field of linguistics. He changed linguists' conception about the nature of language from an externalized to internalized approach. This shift also resulted in the language being thought of as a cognitive phenomenon rather than as a set of structures to be analyzed for their correctness or incorrectness to prove his stance introduced the concept of language faculty, its workings, Universal Grammar, Principles and Parameters, and Transformational and Generative Grammar. The TGG also significantly overhauled the existent phrase structure rules. These rules were brought to follow binarity principles that dictated that a node cannot have less than or more than two branches. Besides the concept of Universal Grammar, along with its principles and parameters, Chomsky simplified how the language acquisition process can be understood: instead of learning hundreds of rules, the human mind has to install a handful of principles and parameters.