Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency

This book argues that major patterns of variation across languages are structured by general principles of efficiency in language use and communication, an approach that has far-reaching theoretical consequences for issues such as ease of processing, language universals, complexity, and competing and cooperating principles.

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).