Table of Contents

1: Edith Moravscik: Introduction PART I: Competition in syntax: Grammatical relations and word order 2: Andrej Malchukov: Resolving alignment conflicts: A competing motivations approach 3: Monique J. A. Lamers and Helen de Hoop: Animate object fronting in Dutch: A production study 4: John A. Hawkins: Patterns in competing motivations and the interaction of principles 5: Elaine J. Francis and Laura A. Michaelis: Why move? How weight and discourse factors combine to predict relative clause extraposition in English 6: Jan Strunk: A statistical model of competing motivations affecting relative clause extraposition in German 7: Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Matthias Schlesewsky: Competition in argument interpretation: Evidence from the neurobiology of language 8: Caroline F. Rowland, Claire Noble, and Angel Chan: Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence structure 9: Mary E. Hughes and Shanley E. M. Allen: Competing constraints in children's omission of subjects? The interaction of verb finiteness and referent accessibility 10: Grzegorz Krajewski and Elena Lieven: Competing cues in early syntactic development PART II: Competition in morphosyntax and the lexicon 11: Wolfgang U. Dressler, Gary Libben, and Katharina Korecky-Kroell: Conflicting vs. converging vs. interdependent motivations in morphology 12: Martin Haspelmath: On system pressure competing with economic motivation 13: Britta Mondorf: Apparently competing motivations in morphosyntactic variation 14: Martin Pfeiffer: Formal vs. functional motivations for the structure of self-repair in German 15: John Haiman: Six competing motives for repetition PART III: General issues and the extension of the approach 16: John W. Du Bois: Motivating competitions 17: Sonia Cristofaro: Competing motivation models and diachrony: What evidence for what motivation? 18: Frederick J. Newmeyer: Where do motivations compete? 19: Johannes Helmbrecht: Politeness distinctions in personal pronouns: A case study of competing motivations 20: Mira Ariel: Or-constructions: Monosemy vs. polysemy 21: Gunther Kaltenboeck and Bernd Heine: Sentence grammar vs. thetical grammar: Two competing domains 22: Brian MacWhinney: 22. Conclusions: Competition across time

About the Author

Brian MacWhinney is Professor of Psychology, Computational Linguistics, and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He has developed a model of first and second language acquisition, processing, and disorders called the Competition Model, which describes how language learning emerges from forces operating on lexically-based patterns across divergent timeframes. It has been tested through cross-linguistic experimentation, neuroimaging, online language learning, and analysis of the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora. His recent publications include The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk (3rd ed; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000) and, co-edited with Roberta Klatzky and Marlene Behrmann, Embodiment, Ego-Space, and Action (Psychology Press 2008). Andrej Malchukov is a Senior Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute for Linguistic Research (Russian Academy of Sciences) and is currently affiliated to the University of Mainz as a Visiting Professor. In addition to descriptive work on Siberian languages, his main research interests lie in the domain of language typology. His publications include the edited volumes The Oxford Handbook of Case (with Andrew Spencer; OUP 2009), Studies in Ditransitive Constructions: A Comparative Handbook (with Bernard Comrie and Martin Haspelmath; Mouton de Gruyter 2010) and Impersonal Constructions: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (with Anna Siewierska; John Benjamins 2011). Edith Moravcsik is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she has taught for over 30 years. Her publications include the textbooks An Introduction to Syntax and An Introduction to Syntactic Theory (both Continuum 2006), and Introducing Language Typology (CUP 2013) and the edited volumes Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics (with Michael Darnell, Frederick Newmeyer, Michael Noonan, and Kathleen Wheatley; John Benjamins 1999) and Formulaic Language (with Roberta Corrigan, Hamid Ouali, and Kathleen Wheatley). She has also published a number of articles on language typology and universals, Hungarian grammar, and conflict resolution.

Reviews

This book is a fascinating, rich collection of papers (21 in total) dealing with the role of competition in syntax (Part I), morphology and the lexicon (Part II), as well as the nature of competition more generally (Part III). * Applied Linguistics *
This book contributes to the understanding of the complexities of language usage in its examination of conflicting factors. * Keren Rice, Studies in Language *