ABSTRACT
Puccini’s familiar opera Madama Butterfly tells of a metamorphosis from Japanese to English and then back again—what appears, at first glance, to be wildly implausible. In this chapter we attempt a little of the same: probe the validity of the principles and parameters approach by exhibiting a single parser, parsing algorithm, and parameterized grammar that works for both English and Japanese, while at the same time exploring some of the computational differences and difficulties that arise.
