Response to David Lightfoot's Review of The Emergence and Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French
Diachronic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11630751 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brigitte L M Bauer (Radboud University Nijmegen), Dale Lightfoot (0000-0002-2591-981X), David W Lightfoot |
| Year | 1997 |
| Volume | 73 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 352-352 |
| Publication date | 1997-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665 |
| Publisher | Linguistic Society of America (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/416023 |
| OpenAlex | W1985455585 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
The Emergence ancl Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French: Diachronic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives.Lightfoot criticizes ideas that are not in the book and also provides inaccurate analyses of its contents.In addition» he places the work in a biological frame it does not have, thus over looking the principal contribution of the work.The book analyzes a major syntactic change and accounts for it by referring to psycholinguistic evidence in order to have objective criteria to evaluate the difficulty of the structures involved.I explicitly state that ' before jum ping to biological evolution, we must fully understand the linguistic principles underlying the phenomena we observe1 (Bauer 1995:216), which reflects a position that recurs constantly in the work.It is therefore amazing that one-third of the review discusses the alleged biological explanation that the book proposes, referring to 'Lamarckism with a twist' , and to the alleged assumption that I argue that X becomes Y because 'our brains work' in a certain way (159), By contrast, the research for the book was carried out from a 'purely linguistic perspective' (Bauer 1995:218), thereupon relating diachronic linguistics and psycholinguistics without any biological or evolutionary perspectives
Cognitive science · Linguistics · Categorization, perception, and language · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |