Response to David Lightfoot's Review of The Emergence and Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French

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

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  Jules Marouzeau•Comptes-rendus des séances de l…•1950

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