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. * Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington *
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, linguistic 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 consequences 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, New Zealand *