Language Acquisition and Change: A Morphosyntactic Perspective

Under which circumstances does grammatical change come about? Is the child the principle agent of change as suggested by historical linguistics?
This book discusses diachronic change of languages in terms of restructuring of speakers’ internal grammatical knowledge. Efforts to construct a theory of diachronic change consistent with findings from psycholinguistics are scarce. Here, these questions are therefore addressed against the background of insights from research on monolingual and bili...