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Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,620
Discovery Miles 16 200
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Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency (Paperback)
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Total price: R1,640
Discovery Miles: 16 400
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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.
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