Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars [Paperback]

John Hawkins demonstrates a clear link between how languages are used and the conventions of their grammars. He sets out a theory in which performance shapes grammars and accounts for the variation patterns found in the world's languages. He backs this up with evidence from a wide array of languages. He also considers the profound consequences of this correspondence for explanations of language change and evolution, and for models of performance and acquisition. His book is of fundamental importance for linguistic theory.

1. Introduction
2. Linguistics Forms, Properties and Efficient Signaling
3. Defining the Efficiency Principles and their Predictions
4. More on Form Minimization
5. Adjacency Effects Within Phrases
6. Minimal Forms in complements/Adjuncts and Proximity
7. Relative Clause and Wh-movement Universals
8. Symmetries, Asymmetric Dependencies and Earliness Effects
9. Conclusions
Abbreviations
References
Index of Authors
Index of Languages
Subject Index

Jack Hawkins has long been a trail-blazer in the attempt to reconcile the results of formal and functional linguistics.Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars charts new territoryin this domain. The book argues persuasively that a small number of performance-based principles combine to account for many grammatical constraints proposed by formal linguists and also explain the origins of numerous typological generalizations discovered by functionalists. --Frederick J. Newmeyer,University of Washington

The central claim in Hawkins's new book is that grammar facilitates language processing. This rather natural idea is by no means novel: attempts to explain aspects of linguistic structure on the basis of processing considerations go back at least to the 1950s. But such attempts have characteristically been little more than 'just so stories'-- that is, post hoc accounts of isolated observations. What has been lacking until now is anylÓU