NY Times piece about a book by that builds upon the work of Dr. Noam Chomsky:
Hard-Wired’ Grammar Rules Found for All
Languages,
by Brenda Fowler.

While most linguists would now agree that language is innate, Dr. Chomsky’s
ideas about principles and parameters have remained bitterly controversial.
Even his supporters could not claim to have tested his theory with the really
tough cases, the languages considered most different from those the linguists
typically know well.

But in a new book, Dr. Mark C. Baker, a linguist at Rutgers University
whose dissertation was supervised by Dr. Chomsky, says he has discerned
the parameters for a remarkably diverse set of languages, especially
American-Indian and African tongues.

In the book, “The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of
Grammar” (Basic Books, 2001), Dr. Baker sets forth a hierarchy of
parameters that sorts them according to their power to affect and potentially
nullify one another.

Just as the periodic table of elements illustrates the discrete units of the
physical world, Dr. Baker’s hierarchy charts the finite set of discrete factors
that create differences in grammars.

That these parameters can be organized in a logical and systematic way, Dr.
Baker says, suggests that there may be some deeper theory underlying them,
and that the hierarchy may even guide language acquisition in children.

The hierarchy is not the same as a family tree, which illustrates the historical
relations among languages