Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency

John A. Hawkins is a professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Davis, and the Emeritus Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He has also held previous positions at the University of Southern California and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and visiting appointments at institutions including UCLA, UC Berkeley, the Free University of Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He has published many books and articles on typology and universals, syntax and grammatical theory, psycholinguistics, and historical linguistics, including A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency(CUP 1994), Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars (OUP 2004) and, co-authored with Luna Filipovic, Criterial Features in L2 English: Specifying the Reference Levels of the Common European Framework (CUP 2012).

• 1. Language Variation and the Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis ; 2. Three General Efficiency Principles ; 3. Some Current Issues in Language Processing and the Performance-Grammar Relationship ; 4. The Conventionalization of Processing Efficiency ; 5. Word Order Patterns: Head Ordering and (Dis)harmony ; 6. The Typology of Noun Phrase Structure ; 7. Ten Differences between VO and OV Languages ; 8. Asymmetries between Arguments of the Verb ; 9. Multiple Factors in Performance and Grammars and their Interaction ; 10. Conclusions

Reviews of Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars Jack 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 grammatical constraints proposed by formal linguists and also explain the origins of numerous typological generalizations discovered by functionalists.