John A. Hawkins

• Professor (Full) at University of California, Davis

Contact between languages has become increasingly recognized as a major source of historical change, as linguistic properties are introduced from one language into another. Yet contact does not necessarily lead to such changes. In fact, arguably most of the properties that contrast between two languages in contact at a given place and time do not c...

In this study, we tested the possibility that different word orders engender different processing preferences. Our key hypothesis was that a head-initial language like English (SVO) allows more prediction compared to a head-final language like Japanese (SOV). In Experiment 1, English and Japanese native speakers completed a cloze task in which they...

We offer an account of preposition drop under clausal ellipsis in terms of two language processing principles: Minimize Domains and Minimize Forms. We argue that when Minimize Domains operates within the PP domain, it disfavors preposition drop due to the preferred independent processability of the PP fragment. When it operates within the VP domain...

Aims and objectives/purpose/research question We propose a model that captures general patterns in bilingual language processing, based on empirical evidence elicited in a variety of experimental studies. We begin by considering what linguistic outputs are logically possible when bilingual speakers communicate based on the typological features of t...

A large number of grammatical and lexical changes occurred in Middle and Early Modern English leading to the type of language we witness today. Other West Germanic languages were more conservative. This article focuses on some of the major contrasts between Modern English and German and proposes a new unifying generalization for them, going beyond...

We propose an explanation for a traditional puzzle in English linguistics involving the use of articles with the nominal modifiers same , identical and similar . Same can only take the definite article the , whereas identical and similar take either the or a . We argue that there is a fundamental difference in the manner in which a comparison is ma...

Elsevier Editorial System(tm) for Physics of Life Reviews Manuscript Draft Manuscript Number: Title: The emergence of grammar in a language-ready brain Comment on Towards a computational comparative neuroprimatology: framing the language-ready brain by Michael A. Arbib Article Type: Comment Keywords: Corresponding Author: Prof. John Hawkins, Corres...

First published in 1986, this book draws together analyses of English and German. It defines the contrasts and similarities between the two languages and, in particular, looks at the question of whether contrasts in one area of the grammar is systematically related to contrasts in another, and whether there is any 'directionality' or unity to contr...

This chapter presents an approach to cross-linguistic variation and typology that is very much in this tradition. It begins by defining Performance–Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (PGCH) and summarizing some converging research from different perspectives that supports it, followed by some brief correspondences between performance and grammars. T...

This book examines the issue of competing motivations in grammar and language use. The term “competing motivations” refers to the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules and which speakers and addressees need to contend with when expressing themselves, or when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on...

Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1986), pp. 413-424

We propose a new model of second language acquisition consisting of multiple interacting principles and inspired by work on complex adaptive systems. The model is referred to as CASP, short for complex adaptive system principles for second language acquisition. It is informed by a broad range of linguistic and psycholinguistic research and supporte...

This article looks at Edward Sapir’s notion of ‘drift’ in the history of the English language and examines drifts from the perspective of John A. Hawkins’ Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (PGCH). According to the PGCH the preferred word orders selected by users in languages with word order freedom are those that are grammaticalized in...

This paper offers an explanation in terms of processing efficiency for Rohdenburg's complexity principle, explicitly-marked phrases are preferred over zero-marked counterparts in cognitively complex environments. A general theory of adjacency is proposed according to which phrases are close to their heads in proportion to the number of combinatoria...

One of the major goals of the Cambridge English Profile Programme is to identify ‘criterial features’ for each of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) proficiency levels as they apply to English, and to assess the impact of different first languages on these features (through ‘transfer’ effects). The present paper defines what is meant...

This book presents a challenge to the widely-held assumption that human languages are both similar and constant in their degree of complexity. For a hundred years or more the universal equality of languages has been a tenet of faith among most anthropologists and linguists. It has been frequently advanced as a corrective to the idea that some langu...

This paper examines cross-linguistic variation patterns in the syntax and morpho-syntax of Noun Phrases. The variation is surprising and not readily explainable in grammatical terms alone, but many of these patterns can be motivated in terms of on-line processing demands. Two processing hypotheses are proposed: anything that is an NP must be recogn...

The papers in this volume can be grouped into two broad, overlapping classes: those dealing primarily with case and those dealing primarily with grammatical relations. With regard to case, topics include descriptions of the case systems of two Caucasian languages, the problems of determining how many cases Russian has and whether Hungarian has a ca...

This paper illustrates an interdisciplinary research program based on cross-linguistic comparison that is of relevance for psychologists working on language processing, so-called “processing typology” [Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; (2004). Efficiency and complexity in g...

The articles in this special issue present very interesting data on the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese. The errors and developmental patterns are partially different from those that have been observed in European languages, and they appear to go against predictions made by the Keenan and Comrie (1977) noun...

This chapter presents a group of corpus data from English, a head-initial language, and some additional data from Japanese, a head-final language, showing clear selection preferences among competing structures. The structures include positioning of complements and adjuncts relative to the verb, and the preferences range from highly productive unatt...

This book addresses a question fundamental to any discussion of grammatical theory and grammatical variation: to what extent can principles of grammar be explained through language use? The book argues that there is a profound correspondence between performance data and the fixed conventions of grammars. Preferences and patterns found in the one, t...

The placement of the particle before or after an object in the English verb-particle construction is influenced by a variety of factors. We argue that many of them can be subsumed under a single simple principle, motivated by considerations of processing efficiency: to the extent that the domains of syntactic and semantic dependencies can be minimi...

Cross-linguistic variation reveals both symmetries (A+B and B+A are productive) and asymmetries (only one ordering is productive, in all languages or in certain subsets). The challenge is to better understand and predict which will be which. This paper introduces a parsing approach based on two efficiency principles. Maximize On-line Processing (Ma...

This paper presents patterns of adjacency in performance data and in cross-linguistic grammatical conventions. It is argued that a common principle of processing efficiency explains both: the more syntactic and semantic relations whose processing domains are minimized, and the greater the minimization preference in the processing of each relati...

This article argues against Manner–Place–Time and other proposed grammatical principles of ordering for prepositional phrases (PPs) in postverbal position in English. Instead, greater empirical adequacy can be achieved by a theory of processing efficiency that defines a preference for minimal domains in the recognition of syntactic phrase str...

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Just over 50 years ago Paul Diderichsen proposed what was to become a very influential analysis of word order in Danish, cf. Diderichsen (1946). His model was a topographical one. It defines the relative ordering of all major slots or positions within a clause that are of relevance for word order, and thereby orders the items of an arbitrary senten...

In this major new book John A. Hawkins presents a new theory of linear ordering in syntax. He argues that processing can provide a simple, functional explanation for syntactic rules of ordering, as well as for the selection among ordering variants in languages and structures in which variation is possible. Insights from generative syntax, typologic...

Contemporary linguistic theories distinguish the principal element of a phrase - the 'head' - from the subordinate elements it dominates. This pervasive grammatical concept has been used to describe and account for linguistic phenomena ranging from agreement and government to word order universals, but opinions differ widely on its precise definiti...

The focus of the present paper is word order variation within languages. There is a widespread view in the literature that the selection among truth-conditionally equivalent word order variants permitted by the grammar is determined primarily by considerations of “information structure”, i.e. pragmatic-semantic notions such as predictability or imp...

Since Paul Grice published ‘Logic and conversation’ in 1975, there have been a number of attempts to develop his programmatic remarks on conversational and conventional implicatures further (see Gazdar, 1979; Atlas & Levinson, 1981; Horn, 1985; Sperber & Wilson, 1986; and especially Levinson, 1983, and the references cited therein). The result has...

Joseph H. Greenberg is a towering figure in late twentieth century linguistics. His major contributions in the field have been in the area of typology and universals, virtually launched by his paper on word order universals, and in diachronic linguistics. The major thrust of Greenberg's work in the past three decades has been in the fusion of these...

The papers in this volume are revised versions of presentations at the conference on Language Universals and Language Typology in March 1985 at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. They include new proposals of universals, results of investigations to validate or refine previously proposed universal generalizations, and discussions concerning th...

Implicational universals can make predictions for first- and second-language acquisition. They predict the relative timing with which structures and properties are acquired in different languages, and also the types of errors that are made (and those that are not made). The first scholar to address the logic of this relationship between (typologica...

This paper offers a reply to Coopmans' 1984 critique of Hawkins 1979, 1980, 1982. Hawkins had attempted, inter alia, to make typological word order universals relevant to concerns of generative grammar. Coopmans denies this relevance. His critique raises fundamental issues about the nature of language universals and their explanation, and about res...

It is often suggested (most recently by Clark and Marshall (1981)) that there are restrictive conditions on the appropriate use of definite descriptions, involving ‘referent identifiability’ or ‘co-presence of the speaker, the hearer and the object referred to‘. The purpose of this note is to argue that such conditions are neither necessary nor suf...

Current research on synchronic word order universals has been most influenced by the work of Joseph Greenberg and by Theo Vennemann, whose work draws extensively on that of Winfred Lehmann. This chapter discusses their contributions, as a background to the reformulated word order universals. Joseph Greenberg is to be credited with the collection of...

This chapter discusses word order variation across languages. Languages appear to vary considerably with regard to word order. Taking the position of the verb relative to subject and object, three common orders are found: SOV, SVO, and VSO, respectively. The orders VOS and OVS are also found, though in relatively few languages. Large numbers of lan...

This chapter presents the Expanded Sample. The Expanded Sample is primarily an extension of Joseph Greenberg's Appendix II, though with additional word order data collected for as many languages as possible. The Expanded Sample presented in the chapter is classified both typologically and genetically. The typological classification of the Expanded...

This chapter discusses the diachronic predictions of distributional universals. The frequency hierarchies defined by distributional universals make two interrelated predictions for diachrony. There will be greater pressure for a language to move from right to left than vice versa and there will be a direct relation between language frequencies and...

Having set up implicational universals distinguishing attested from non-attested word order co-occurrences in Joseph Greenberg's data and the Expanded Sample, it can be shown that the numerical distribution of languages across the attested types is principled. Underlying the relative sizes of the word order co-occurrence types, there emerges a dist...

This chapter presents a set of reformulated implicational universals for much of Joseph Greenberg's word order data. It presents a discussion of the general properties of adequate implicational universals of word order. The implicational universals to be proposed in the chapter have the following properties: they are almost all nonstatistical, that...

This chapter discusses the diachronic predictions made by implicational universals for language change and their potential role in explaining why word orders change. It presents the predictions made by implicational universals for the timing of changes relative to one another in a language's history. The chapter presents the formulation of some fin...

In a recent paper in this journal, Hawkins (1980), it was observed that there was considerable, but quite principled, variation both in the types and in the quantities of word order co-occurrences found in Greenberg's (1966) data (cf. his Appendix I (AI) and Appendix II (AII), reproduced here as Tables 1 and 2 respectively). We formulated two types...

This chapter provides an overview of language universals and the logic of historical reconstruction. Within historical linguistics, language universals are also productively employed in the methodologically quite distinct task of reconstructing hypothesized protolanguages together with the putative changes that link these to their attested daughter...

This paper argues that the theory of Universal Grammar must include both implicational universals and universals of language distribution in the description and explanation of word order. Implicational universals are of the form: if a language has some property (or properties) P, then it will also have some property (or properties) Q. These ‘if P t...

Implicational universals of the form 'If a language has some word order P, then it also has word order(s) Q' are widely used to explain word order change. A language which develops word order P without having Q is said to be universally inconsistent, and it is predicted that it will re-introduce consistency by subsequently acquiring Q. This paper,...