The Development of Language: Acquisition, Change, and Evolution

Part I: Introduction:.

1. Progress or Degeneration?.

2. The Records, our Witnesses.

3. Lack of Change and Historical Explanation.

4. Our Odyssey.

Part II: The Nineteenth: Century of History:.

5. Historical Relationships.

6. Sound Change.

7. Historical Explanations.

8. Determinist Views of History.

Part III: Grammars and Language Acquisition:.

9. We Know More than we Learn.

10. The Nature of Grammars.

11. The Acquisition Problem: The Poverty of the Stimulus.

12. The Analytical Triplet.

13. Real-Time Acquisition of Grammars.

Part IV: Gradualism and Catastrophes:.

14. Grammars and Change.

15. Social Grammars.

16. Gradualism, Imagined and Real.

17. Catastrophes.

18. Competing Grammars.

19. The Spread of New Grammars.

20. Parametric Change.

Part V: The Loss of Case and its Syntactic Effects:.

21. Case.

22. Middle English Split Genitives.

23. Inherent Case and Thematic Roles in Early English.

24. The Loss and Origin of Case Systems.

Part VI: Cue-Based Acquisition and Change in Grammars:.

25. Models of Learnability.

26. Cue-Based Acquisition and Loss of Verb-Second.

27. V-to-I Raising and its Cue.

28. Creolization and Signed Languages.

Part VII: Equilibrium and Small Punctuations:.

29. Equilibrium.

30. English Auxiliary Verbs in the Eighteenth Century.

31. French chez.

Part VIII: Historicism: The Use and Abuse of Clio:.

32. Principles of History.

33. Clio Working through Biology.

34. Diachronic Reanalyses.

35. Trajectories.

Part IX: The Evolution of the Language Faculty:.

36. Bumpiness.

37. Explaining Evolution.

38. A UG Condition on Movement Traces.

39. The Condition is Maladaptive.

40. Conclusion.

Part X: A Science of History:.

41. Classical and Chaotic Views of Science.

43. History as an Epiphenomenon.

References.

Index.