摘要：Opposing to the behaviorist approach, the alternative approach proposed by Chomsky believes that language acquisition cannot be accounted for without considering a linguistically specific system of Principles and Parameters which every healthy child is expected to have genetically in his or her mind. A set of absolute Universals, Notions and Principles exist in the UG which do not vary from one language to another, while certain grammatical principles and rules may be universal. It is also true that languages differ from one another in some important ways like being either head-initial or head-last. Regarding English head parameters, all heads (whether nouns, verbs, prepositions, or adjectives etc.) normally precede their complements. In this study we tried to investigate why this language is considered as a head initial one despite the occurrence of different options for every NP, VP, AP and PP.
关键词：head parameter setting; head initial; head final; universal grammar
