In May 1985 the University of Massachusetts held the first conference on
the parameter setting model of grammar and acquisition. The conference
was conceived in the belief that there is a new possibility of tightly
connecting grammatical studies and language acquisition studies, and
that this new possibility has grown out of the new generation of ideas
about the relation of Universal Grammar to the grammar of particular
languages. The papers in this volume are all concerned in one way or
another with the 'parametric' model of grammar, and with its role in
explaining the acquisition of language. Before summarizing the
accompanying papers, I would like to sketch the intellectual background
of these new ideas. It has long been the acknowledged goal of
grammatical theorists to explicate the relation between the experience
of the child and the knowledge of the adult. Somehow, the child selects
a unique grammar (by assumption) compatible with a random partially
unreliable sample of some language. In the earliest work in generative
grammar, starting with Chomsky's Aspects, and extending to such works as
Jackendoffs Lexicalist Syntax (1977), the model of this account was the
formal evaluation metric, accompanied by a general rule writing system.
The model of acquisition was the following: the child composed a grammar
by writing rules in the rule writing system, under the constraint that
the rules must be compatible with the data, and that the grammar must be
the one most highly valued by the evaluation metric.
