Adrian Buck’s Reviews > The Genesis of Grammar: A Reconstruction > Status Update

"For example, two millenia were enough in the development from Latin to Modern Romance languages to introduce new modes of marking case, tense, aspect, modality, and subordination, and even less time was required for a similar development from Old English to present day English." - drift vs contact? The impact of literacy?

"babies do not initiate changes. Groups of interacting speakers do, especially adolescents." - consistent with the research into accent formation in Milton Keynes

"...one further motivation of grammaticalization consists of creating new usage patterns and functional categories by replicating categories from other languages."...I've been unhappy with the analogy drawn between biological and language evolution throughout this book. This discussion of replication across languages makes it clear that the analogy we should be making is not with reproduction but with viral infection

"[Newmeyer] goes on to hypothesize that..."cognition left its mark on language before communication"" - my next destination on this journey, if some animals are on layer II of grammatical evolution where are they in terms of cognition?

"Structure began to emerge when there were preferences on how to arrange existing items, which became habits, which may have turned into rules" - at least in the minds of grammarians

"We hypothesize that this was the first stage where the first phrasal structures arose, namely noun-adjective and verb-adverb constructions" - theoretically verb agreement markers for person come much later after pronound. They represent nominal meaning that is part of verb phrase? I would to see an account of this.

"And finally, we wish to reiterate that recursion is a theory-dependent notion - it is a property of a system of rules proposed rather than of the phenomenon to be studied" - perfectly encapsulates my problems with Professor Chomsky's approach.

"[Iteration] is not restricted to the noun phrase or the clause; it is also a productive mechanism of the verb phrase (e.g. He came in, sat down...)" - only if you assume subject elipsis is not taking place (He came in, [he] sat down...) This is another another example of how ambiguous simple language can be to grammatical analysis. Ellipsis is a great source of this ambiguity.

Focusing on just one aspect of grammar - subordination - and describing the ways individual languages have realised it shows the plasticity of language. But the way language contact leads to linguistic change remains on the horizon. Does the existing structure of a language limit how it can be changed by another. Norse influenced Old English because they were close; Old Welsh didn't because it wasn't?

The similarities between the grammatical achievements of animals and partially socialized humans are fascinating. But the authors don't adequately stress the far superior lexical achievements of the humans - a greater capacity to form and store concepts; nor the developmental aspect of the acquisition of grammar - the critical period hypothesis; nor has there been any discussion of 2nd language learners.