Recent ucdavislibrary_oabooks items

Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This book argues that major patterns of variation across languages are structured by general principles of efficiency in language use and communication. Evidence for these comes from languages permitting structural choices from which selections are made in performance, e.g. between competing word orders and between relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun versus a gap. The preferences and patterns of performance within languages are reflected in the fixed conventions and variation patterns across grammars, leading to a ‘‘Performance–Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis.’’ The general theory that is laid out in Hawkins’s Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars (OUP) is extended and updated. New areas of grammar and of performance are discussed, new research findings are incorporated that test Hawkins’s earlier predictions, and new advances in the contributing fields of language processing, linguistic theory, historical linguistics, and typology are addressed. This efficiency approach...

Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move (Second Edition)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Migration is a dramatic behaviour distinct from other movements. It is an important component of life histories of biodiverse organisms including terrestrial and marine vertebrates, insects, many invertebrates, and the propagules of some plants. This sequel discusses migration across a wide range of groups and species drawing comparisons to illuminate migratory life cycles and their evolution. It takes an integrative approach to migration as a physiological and behavioural phenomenon with important ecological consequences. Part I defines migration in relation to other movements, provides examples, and includes an updated chapter on recent results from newly developed electronic tracking and other methods. Part II surveys proximate mechanisms including physiology, morphology, constraints, the use of winds and currents, and new discoveries regarding the ability to orient and navigate. Part III on the evolution of migratory life histories is the longest section of the book. It...

The Aesthetic Character of Blackness: Sounds Like Us

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In The Aesthetic Character of Blackness, Jemma DeCristo theorizes the means by which black art liberates the free world but does not and cannot liberate black people. Drawing on Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke and as well as the aesthetic thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Theodor Adorno, DeCristo critiques the exaltation of black culture and art’s saving power by analyzing the violence underneath aesthetic production. She tracks black music’s representational and anti-representational capacities in projects of black non/humanization from nineteenth-century abolitionism and the founding of the recording industry to the emergence of black queer blues performers and the rise of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Theorizing the contemporary neoliberalization of black audio-visual spectacle, DeCristo ultimately demonstrates that the voluptuous world of black aesthetics beautifies an anti-black world that wields...