Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars

John A. Hawkins completed his PhD at Cambridge University in 1975. He has held positions at the University of Essex, the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, and the University of Southern California. In 2003 he was elected to a chair at Cambridge. His visiting appointments include UCLA, Berkeley, Potsdam, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He has research interests in linguistics and cognitive science and has published books and articles on typology and universals, syntax and grammatical theory, and psycholinguistics and historical linguistics. Recently, his particular focus has been the relationship between principles of language use and grammars. His books include A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency (Cambridge, 1994); A Comparative Typology of English and German (Austin, 1986) Word Order Universals (New York, 1983), Definiteness, and Indefiniteness: A Study in Reference and Grammaticality Prediction (London, 1978).

• 1. Introduction ; 2. Linguistics Forms, Properties and Efficient Signaling ; 3. Defining the Efficiency Principles and their Predictions ; 4. More on Form Minimization ; 5. Adjacency Effects Within Phrases ; 6. Minimal Forms in complements/Adjuncts and Proximity ; 7. Relative Clause and Wh-movement Universals ; 8. Symmetries, Asymmetric Dependencies and Earliness Effects ; 9. Conclusions ; Abbreviations ; References ; Index of Authors ; Index of Languages ; Subject Index

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.