1: Navajo as Default
2: Defining Grammatical Complexity
3: Epistemological Caveats
4: English: The "Irriataion" of Nuance
5: "Altaicization" or Simplification?
6: Persian: "The Most Atypical Iranian Language"
7: Colloquial Arabic: A Mysterious "Drift"
8: Malay: "A More Approachable Structure:
9: A New Typlogy of Language Contact
"The main virture of this book is that it is written in a clear way
and is very readable in spite of the fact that McWhorter discusses
a large amount of data from a variety of sources. Chapters 4-8, the
test cases for the main claim of the book, are organized in a
similar fashion and contain tables where data from languages are
presented in a way that helps the reader to follow the analysis.
This is important as the cases discussed come from different
language
families, so it is unlikely that the reader will be familiar with
all of them. McWhorter's writing is engaging; he succeeds in
looking at specific, local cases from a broad perspective and
draws
parallels between them. The presentation of the data is lucid and
everything is connected to the central line of argumentation of the
book in a direct way." --Linguist List
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