This talk offers an interface-based analysis of some familiar and some recently discovered linguistic data from three language groups – Slavic, Germanic and Kwa – in support of the hypothesis that the observable parametric variation in ordering reflects the nature of the externalization process, i.e., phonological/morphological interface (PF), rather than the narrow syntax itself (Berwick & Chomsky's 2008). Adaptation of this hypothesis implies that syntactic parameters cannot be viewed as specified by formal features of functional heads (Borer 1984). I show on the basis of the encoding of two types of information-structural interpretations, prominence and disambiguation, that an economy-driven interface-based account (Reinhart 1995, 2006) successfully captures the data, while an analysis in terms of functional features runs into substantial theoretical and empirical complications.
