Books by Joan (University of New Mexico) Bybee

This new introduction offers a guide to the types of change at all levels of linguistic structure, as well as the mechanisms behind each type. Based on data from a variety of methods and a huge array of language families, it examines patterns of change, and brings together recent findings.

Language demonstrates structure while also showing variation at all levels. This book focuses on the dynamic processes that create languages and give them their structure and variance. It outlines a theory of language use and language change which has implications for cognitive processing and language evolution.

Referencing new developments, this book investigates various ways in which a speaker/hearer's experience with language affects the representation of phonology. Rather than assuming phonological representations in terms of phonemes, Joan Bybee adopts an exemplar model, in which specific tokens of use are stored and categorized phonetically with reference to variables in the context.