Professor Ljiljana Progovac publishes new book

A new book by WSU Linguistics Program Director Ljiljana Progovac entitled Evolutionary Syntax has just been published by Oxford University Press.

David Gil of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology writes:

"This is the book that brings Chomsky and Darwin together, arguing that the basic tenets of the minimalist program and its hierarchic sentence structure support a gradualist approach to the evolution of language motivated by natural selection.

A must read for linguists of diverse persuasions, demonstrating to theoretical syntacticians the relevance of evolution to the architecture of grammar, while suggesting to students of the evolution of language that valuable insights may be on offer from the minimalist approach.

Grammarians will also find novel analyses of "syntactic fossils" such as compounds, root small clauses, and thetic statements in this well-written book that is hard to put down."