This volume on developmental linguistics offers method and rationale for analyses of complex variation in British English and ancient Greek within the grammar—i.e. without regard to the distribution of language variants in geographical or social space. The book offers a host of grammatical (and social) reasons for accepting the beginnings of English as a French creole with Romance-like syntactic phenomena too involved to be viewed as borrowings, though disguised to casual observers by reason of the many Anglo-Saxon calques on French functor words. Two long chapters show how assuming a non-Germanic origin of English combine with a sophisticated theory of reversals in marked environments to disclose an entirely new understanding of English grammar, especially with regard to verb modalities and pronoun usage. Other chapters deal with aspects of historical change and variation in a developmentalist framework.
