Possible dimensions of language variation. For example, languages may chose to place the object either after the verb, as in English, or before the verb, as in Turkish. The notion of parameters formed a major building block in Noam Chomsky’stheory of grammar that first saw the light in his book Aspects of the theory of syntax (1965), and supported by the likes of Howard Lasnik. According to this theory, there are a set ofgeneral grammatical principles that co-exist with specific parameters that canbe turned on or off by a particular linguistic environments. Thus, while an infant is born with an innatetheory of linguistic data, the child then evaluates and constructs a number ofpossible grammars that are consistent with the linguistic data, and in this wayacquires a culture-specific grammar such as the example cited above. This theory has waned in popularity over thelast two decades or so.
See Generative grammar approach, Grammaticization (or grammaticalization), Innate (1), Parameter (statistics), Principle, Syntax