Review article

In his recent bid for the presidency of the Association for Mathematics of Language, Makoto Kanazawa writes:*The scientific study of language is such a large and important field that it's strange that so little mathematical research is being carried out. By comparison, the latest issue of Journal of Economic Theory has 14 original articles, and all but one of them are mathematical papers in the sense of containing theorems and proofs. And the title of the journal is not ‘Journal of Mathematical Economics’, which is actually a separate journal.1 That linguistics lags behind economics is not surprising: making more money is a stronger drive for change and progress than better understanding the language faculty. But Bruce Tesar's book shows that the time might be ripe for change and progress in our field as well. Employing a formally sophisticated analytical approach (as opposed to a purely simulation-based approach), the book provides a beautiful example of the interplay between learnability and structural assumptions on the typological space. It thus shows that computational phonology has become a mature subfield of generative linguistics.