book notice

[Brian MacWhinney]

The following is a book which readers of this list might find of interest.
For more information please visit
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/DEGLHF98

Language Creation and Language Change
Creolization, Diachrony, and Development
edited by Michel DeGraff

Research on creolization, language change, and language acquisition has been
converging toward a triangulation of the constraints along which grammatical
systems develop within individual speakers--and (viewed externally) across
generations of speakers. The originality of this volume is in its comparison
of various sorts of language development from a number of
linguistic-theoretic and empirical perspectives, using data from both speech
and gestural modalities and from a diversity of acquisition environments. In
turn, this comparison yields fresh insights on the mental bases of language
creation.

The book is organized into five parts: creolization and acquisition;
acquisition under exceptional circumstances; language processing and
syntactic change; parameter setting in acquisition and through creolization
and language change; and a concluding part integrating the contributors'
observations and proposals into a series of commentaries on the state of the
art in our understanding of language development, its role in creolization
and diachrony, and implications for linguistic theory.

Michel DeGraff is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.

Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change series

Contributors
Dany Adone, Derek Bickerton, Adrienne Bruyn, Marie Coppola, Michel DeGraff,
Viviane Déprez, Alison Henry, Judy Kegl, David Lightfoot, John S. Lumsden,
Salikoko S. Mufwene, Pieter Muysken, Elissa L. Newport, Luigi Rizzi, Ian
Roberts, Ann Senghas, Rex A. Sprouse, Denise Tangney, Anne Vainikka, Barbara
S. Vance, Maaike Verrips.

7 x 10, 586 pp., 4 illus., cloth ISBN 0-262-04168-5


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