ABSTRACT
The acquisition literature make frequent use of the terms theory, process, mechanism and account. The author uses the term theory to refer to a set of deductive principles that state the relationship between innate knowledge and a representative sample of input sentences from any human language. The author uses the term process to refer to the interaction between a theory and the world, or what one might call orthogonal theories. The author uses the term mechanism to refer to deterministic interactions within and beyond the theory. We might have one parameter which is set by the presence of a particular sentence. The author uses the term Account to refer to the full picture of what occurs in acquisition: the deterministic interaction between linguistic principles, non-linguistic triggers, and their relation to non-deterministic processing and pragmatic pre-requisites.
