Linguistic Evolution through Language Acquisition

This groundbreaking study of how children acquire language and the effects on language change over the generations draws on a wide range of examples. The book covers specific syntactic universals and the nature of syntactic change. It reviews the language-learning mechanisms required to acquire an existing linguistic system (accurately and to impose further structure on an emerging system) and the evolution of language(s) in relation to this learning mechanism.

Ted Briscoe is Lecturer in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He has published around 50 research articles.