Language Change, Variation, and Universals

This volume explores how human languages become what they are, why they differ from one another in certain ways but not in others, and why they change in the ways that they do. Peter Culicover proposes that language change and variation are responses to the pressure to find efficient grammatical solutions to the task of expressing human thought.

Peter W. Culicover, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University

Peter W. Culicover is currently Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University. He previously held positions at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Arizona, where he was Head of the Department of Linguistics. His awards include the Distinguished Fulbright Chair in Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Venice and the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research is concerned primarily with understanding and explaining the syntactic structure of human languages, and he has explored such topics as language learnability, computational modeling of language acquisition and language change, the grammar of focus, grammatical constructions, the grammar of contemporary English and the architecture of grammar. His many publications include the OUP volumes Simpler Syntax (with Ray Jackendoff, 2005), Natural Language Syntax (2009), Grammar and Complexity (2013), and Explaining Syntax (2013).