A lambda-free logical framework takes parameterisation and definitions as the basic notions to
provide schematic mechanisms for specification of type theories and their use in practice. The
framework presented here, PAL+, is a logical framework for specification and implementation
of type theories, such as Martin-Löf's type theory or UTT. As in Martin-Löf's logical
framework (Nordström et al., 1990), computational rules can be introduced and are used to
give meanings to the declared constants. However, PAL+ only allows one to talk about the
concepts that are intuitively in the object type theories: types and their objects, and families
of types and families of objects of types. In particular, in PAL+, one cannot directly represent
families of families of entities, which could be done in other logical frameworks by means of
lambda abstraction. PAL+ is in the spirit of de Bruijn's PAL+ for Automath (de Bruijn, 1980).
Compared with PAL, PAL+ allows one to represent parametric concepts such as families of
types and families of non-parametric objects, which can be used by themselves as totalities
as well as when they are fully instantiated. Such parametric objects are represented by local
definitions (let-expressions). We claim that PAL+ is a correct meta-language for specifying
type theories (e.g., dependent type theories), as it has the advantage of exactly capturing the
intuitive concepts in object type theories, and that its implementation reflects the actual use
of type theories in practice. We shall study the meta-theory of PAL+ by developing its typed
operational semantics and showing that it has nice meta-theoretic properties.