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  • Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency

    Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency by Hawkins, John A.;

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    Product details:

    • Publisher OUP Oxford
    • Date of Publication 27 February 2014

    • ISBN 9780199665006
    • Binding Paperback
    • No. of pages292 pages
    • Size 247x172x18 mm
    • Weight 530 g
    • Language English
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    Short description:

    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.

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    Long description:

    In this book John A. Hawkins argues that major patterns of variation across languages are structured by general principles of efficiency in language use and communication. Evidence for these comes from languages permitting structural options from which selections are made in performance, e.g. between competing word orders and between relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun versus a gap. The preferences and patterns of performance within languages are reflected, he shows, in the fixed conventions and variation patterns across grammars, leading to a 'Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis'. Hawkins extends and updates the general theory that he laid out in Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars (OUP 2004): new areas of grammar and performance are discussed, new research findings are incorporated that test his earlier predictions, and new advances in the contributing fields of language processing, linguistic theory, historical linguistics, and typology are addressed. This efficiency approach to variation has far-reaching theoretical consequences relevant to many current issues in the language sciences. These include the notion of ease of processing and how to measure it, the role of processing in language change, the nature of language universals and their explanation, the theory of complexity, the relative strength of competing and cooperating principles, and the proper definition of fundamental grammatical notions such as 'dependency'. The book also offers a new typology of VO and OV languages and their correlating properties seen from this perspective, and a new typology of the noun phrase and of argument structure.

    Reviews of Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars

    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 territory in 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.

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    Table of Contents:

    Language Variation and the Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis
    Three General Efficiency Principles
    Some Current Issues in Language Processing and the Performance-Grammar Relationship
    The Conventionalization of Processing Efficiency
    Word Order Patterns: Head Ordering and (Dis)harmony
    The Typology of Noun Phrase Structure
    Ten Differences between VO and OV Languages
    Asymmetries between Arguments of the Verb
    Multiple Factors in Performance and Grammars and their Interaction
    Conclusions

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