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This book argues that major patterns of variation across languages are structured by general principles of efficiency in language use and communication, an approach that has far-reaching theoretical consequences for issues such as ease of processing, language universals, complexity, and competing and cooperating principles.
List of contents
- 1: Language Variation and the Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis
- 2: Three General Efficiency Principles
- 3: Some Current Issues in Language Processing and the Performance-Grammar Relationship
- 4: The Conventionalization of Processing Efficiency
- 5: Word Order Patterns: Head Ordering and (Dis)harmony
- 6: The Typology of Noun Phrase Structure
- 7: Ten Differences between VO and OV Languages
- 8: Asymmetries between Arguments of the Verb
- 9: Multiple Factors in Performance and Grammars and their Interaction
- 10: Conclusions
About the author
John A. Hawkins is a professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Davis, and the Emeritus Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He has also held previous positions at the University of Southern California and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and visiting appointments at institutions including UCLA, UC Berkeley, the Free University of Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He has published many books and articles on typology and universals, syntax and grammatical theory, psycholinguistics, and historical linguistics, including A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency(CUP 1994), Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars (OUP 2004) and, co-authored with Luna Filipovic, Criterial Features in L2 English: Specifying the Reference Levels of the Common European Framework (CUP 2012).
Summary
This book argues that major patterns of variation across languages are structured by general principles of efficiency in language use and communication, an approach that has far-reaching theoretical consequences for issues such as ease of processing, language universals, complexity, and competing and cooperating principles.
Additional text
Hawkins argues that grammars are profoundly affected by the way humans process language. He develops a simple but elegant theory of performance and grammar by drawing on concepts and data from generative grammar, linguistic typology, experimental psycholinguistics and historical linguistics. In so doing, he also makes a laudable attempt to bridge the schism between the two research traditions in linguistics, the formal and the functional. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars is a major contribution with far-reaching consequences and implications for many of the fundamental issues in linguistic theory. This is a tremendous piece of scholarship that no linguist can afford to neglect.
