By Terje Lohndal, Juan Uriagereka
The biolinguistic approach to generative grammar has in recent years emphasized the relevance of principles that are not specific to the Faculty of Language. These are taken to work together with both genetic endowment and experience to determine relevant languages. Chomsky (2005) labels these non-language-specific principles ‘third factors’, and argues that computational efficiency is a core example of the notion.