Principles and parameters

Okay kiddo, imagine you have a bunch of different rules you have to follow when playing a game. These rules tell you things like how many steps you can take, what you can and can't do with the ball, and how many points you get for scoring. These are your principles.

Now, imagine you can change some of these rules if you want to play a different version of the game. Maybe instead of counting points, you want to see who can score the most goals. Or maybe you want to change the number of players on each team. These are your parameters - they're the things you can adjust to make the game different.

In linguistics, we have principles and parameters too! Principles are the basic rules that tell us how language works, like the order words go in and the sounds they make. Parameters are the things we can change to create different languages or dialects. For example, English has a parameter that lets us put adjectives in front of nouns ("red balloon"), but some languages put adjectives after nouns ("balloon red").

So just like with a game, we have a set of basic rules (principles) that we can adjust (parameters) to create different languages or dialects. It's pretty cool, huh?