Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars - John A.Hawkins.pdf - Podręczniki - Dyziasty

John 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 gram-

matical constraints proposed by formal linguists and also explain the origins

of numerous typological generalizations discovered by functionalists.

FrederickJ.Newmeyer, University of Washington.

The central claim in Hawkins’s new book is that grammar facilitates language

processing. This rather natural idea is by no means novel: attempts to explain

aspects of linguistic structure on the basis of processing considerations go back

at least to the 1950s. But such attempts have characteristically been little more

than “just so stories” – that is, post hoc accounts of isolated observations. What

has been lacking until now is anything that could be called a theory of how

constraints on the human processor shape grammatical structure.

Hawkins has ﬁlled this lacuna. Starting with three very general and intuitive

principles about efﬁcient processing of language, he derives a rich array of

predictions about what kinds of grammatical structures should be preferred.

He then adduces a wealth of evidence to demonstrate that his predictions hold.

His data are of a variety of types, including grammatical patterns in particu-

lar languages, typological tendencies, usage statistics from corpora, historical

changes, and psycholinguistic ﬁndings. The phenomena he deals with are sim-

ilarly varied, including word order, case making, ﬁller-gap dependencies, island

constraints, and anaphoric binding.

Efﬁciency and Complexity in Grammars is a landmark work, setting a new

standard in the study of the relationship between linguistic competence and

performance.

Tom Wasow, Stanford University.

Hawkins argues that grammars are profoundly affected by the way humans

process language. He develops a simple but elegant theory of performance

and grammar by drawing on concepts and data from generative grammar, lin-

guistic typology, experimental psycholinguistics and historical linguistics. In

so doing, he also makes a laudable attempt to bridge the schism between the

two research traditions in linguistics, the formal and the functional. Efﬁciency

and Complexity in Grammars is a major contribution with far-reaching con-

sequences and implications for many of the fundamental issues in linguistic

theory. This is a tremendous piece of scholarship that no linguist can afford to

neglect.

Jae Jung Song, University of Otago.

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Efﬁciency and

Complexity in

Grammars

JOHN A. HAWKINS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox26dp

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First published 2004

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