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More About This Textbook
Overview
A language develops over time, it develops in a child, and the capacity for language has evolved in the human species.
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
"My favourite parts were those that gave detailed explanations forlearning in the context of a changing language input: how childrensolve the problem of an emergent syntactic property, one thatdoesn't appear to cohere with the rest of the system, with theresult that the grammar is reorganized in the next generation."Lila Gleitman"David Lightfoot is addressing the core questions of the studyof language: what it is, how it comes to be that way, how the childacquires it. His account is richly textured, integrating manydifferent approaches with lucidity and insight. His analyses andconclusions are challenging and provocative, both for specialistsin the particular areas he brings together, and for those seeking aclear picture of current understanding and open problems." NoamChomsky
'There can be little question that it will represent a majorwork, required reading for anyone with interests in this area.'Mark Hale, Concordia University
"This book challenges conventional understanding of languagelearning by showing that language change is essentiallycontingent-unpredictable but explainable. The role of naturalselection in facilitating the understanding of the evolution of thelanguage faculty in the human species is contested."Psycholinguistics
Product Details
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Meet the Author
David Lightfoot is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park where he is also Associate Director of the program in Neural and Cognitive Science. His books include The Language Lottery and How to Set Parameters.
Table of Contents
Foreword.
Part I: Introduction:.
1. Progress or Degeneration?.
2. The Records, our Witnesses.
3. Lack of Change and Historical Explanation.
4. Our Odyssey.
Part II: The Nineteenth: Century of History:.
5. Historical Relationships.
6. Sound Change.
7. Historical Explanations.
8. Determinist Views of History.
Part III: Grammars and Language Acquisition:.
9. We Know More than we Learn.
10. The Nature of Grammars.
11. The Acquisition Problem: The Poverty of the Stimulus.
12. The Analytical Triplet.
13. Real-Time Acquisition of Grammars.
Part IV: Gradualism and Catastrophes:.
14. Grammars and Change.
15. Social Grammars.
16. Gradualism, Imagined and Real.
17. Catastrophes.
18. Competing Grammars.
19. The Spread of New Grammars.
20. Parametric Change.
Part V: The Loss of Case and its Syntactic Effects:.
21. Case.
22. Middle English Split Genitives.
23. Inherent Case and Thematic Roles in Early English.
24. The Loss and Origin of Case Systems.
Part VI: Cue-Based Acquisition and Change inGrammars:.
25. Models of Learnability.
26. Cue-Based Acquisition and Loss of Verb-Second.
27. V-to-I Raising and its Cue.
28. Creolization and Signed Languages.
Part VII: Equilibrium and Small Punctuations:.
29. Equilibrium.
30. English Auxiliary Verbs in the Eighteenth Century.
31. French chez.
Part VIII: Historicism: The Use and Abuse of Clio:.
32. Principles of History.
33. Clio Working through Biology.
34. Diachronic Reanalyses.
35. Trajectories.
Part IX: The Evolution of the Language Faculty:.
36. Bumpiness.
37. Explaining Evolution.
38. A UG Condition on Movement Traces.
39. The Condition is Maladaptive.
40. Conclusion.
Part X: A Science of History:.
41. Classical and Chaotic Views of Science.
43. History as an Epiphenomenon.
References.
Index.