1. Introduction -- 2. The Nineteenth: Century of History -- 3. Grammars and Language Acquisition -- 4. Gradualism and Catastrophes -- 5. The Loss of Case and its Syntactic Effects -- 6. Cue-Based Acquisition and Change in Grammars -- 7. Equilibrium and Small Punctuations -- 8. Historicism: The Use and Abuse of Clio -- 9. The Evolution of the Language Faculty -- 10. A Science of History
Summary
How and why do languages change over time? Could the way an individual child develops affect aggregate language change? What do the mechanisms of change tell us about the evolution of language in our species? The "cue-based" approach to language acquisition presented here is a radical departure from formal models of language learning. Lightfoot challenges conventional understanding by showing that language change is essentially contingent - unpredictable but explainable; and he contests how far natural selection enables us to understand the evolution of the language faculty in the species
