Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony, and Development

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 D=E9prez,
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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