Foreword.

Part I: Introduction.

Part II: The Nineteenth: Century of History.

Part III: Grammars and Language Acquisition.

Part IV: Gradualism and Catastrophes.

Part V: The Loss of Case and its Syntactic Effects.

Part VI: Cue-Based Acquisition and Change in Grammars.

Part VII: Equilibrium and Small Punctuations.

Part VIII: Historicism: The Use and Abuse of Clio.

Part IX: The Evolution of the Language Faculty.

Part X: A Science of History.

References.

Index.

"My favourite parts were those that gave detailed explanations for
learning in the context of a changing language input: how children
solve the problem of an emergent syntactic property, one that
doesn't appear to cohere with the rest of the system, with the
result that the grammar is reorganized in the next generation."
Lila Gleitman

"David Lightfoot is addressing the core questions of the study
of language: what it is, how it comes to be that way, how the child
acquires it. His account is richly textured, integrating many
different approaches with lucidity and insight. His analyses and
conclusions are challenging and provocative, both for specialists
in the particular areas he brings together, and for those seeking a
clear picture of current understanding and open problems." Noam
Chomsky

'There can be little question that it will represent a major
work, required reading for anyone with interests in this area.'
Mark Hale, Concordia University

"This book challenges conventional understanding of language
learning by showing that language change is essentially
contingent-unpredictable but explainable. The role of natural
selection in facilitating the understanding of the evolution of the
language faculty in the human species is contested."
Psycholinguistics

David Lightfoot is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park where he is also Associate Director of the program in Neural and Cognitive Science. His books include The Language Lottery and How to Set Parameters.

D. Lightfoot, National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA