Borerian

We have developed an analysis of one example of cross-linguistic variation which follows that Borerian line of thinking, but at the same time, due to a universal base of underlying syntactico-semantic categories, may still provide an explanatory limit on the bounds of variation.

While the earlier Principles and Parameters framework conceived of parameters as UG-provided toggle switches with language-particular settings, the Borerian approach, as pursued in feature-driven Minimalist syntax, instead understands parameters in terms of the inventory of features active in a particular language (and perhaps also the structural positions in which those features occur).

This reflects the thinking behind Yang’s (2002) ‘Variational Learner’: that competition is between individual parameters (from a Borerian perspective, specifications of properties of functional heads), not between whole grammars.