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Paper at a Glance

An evolutionary approach to (logistic-like)
language change
Ted Briscoe
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
ejb@cl.cam.ac.uk
Draft { Comments Welcome

Abstract Niyogi and Berwick have developed a deterministic dynamical model of language change from which they analytically derive logistic, S- shaped spread of a linguistic variant through a speech community given certain assumptions about the language learning procedure, the linguistic environment, and so forth. I will demonstrate that the same assumptions embedded in a stochastic model of language change lead to dierent and sometimes counterintuitive predictions. I will go on to argue that stochastic models are more appropriate and can support greater demographic and (psycho)linguistic realism, leading to more insightful accounts of the (putative) growth rates of attested changes.
1 Introduction It has been observed that language changes (often?) spread through a speech community following an S-shaped pattern, beginning slowly, spreading faster, then slowing o before nally extinguishing a competing variant (e.g. Weinreich et al. , 1968; Chen, 1972; Bailey, 1973:77; Lass, 1997; Shen, 1997). (This obser- vation even makes it into Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language along with other statistical chestnuts such as Zipf's law(s).) Kroch (1990) discusses a number of attested grammatical changes and ar- gues that in each case they can be analysed as cases of competing grammatical subsystems where the rate(s) of change, measured by diverse surface cues in his- torical texts exemplifying the successful grammatical subsystem, can be tted to one member of the family of logistic functions which generate such S-shaped curves. Kroch uses the logistic as a tool to demonstrate a single underlying rate of change and thus a single causative factor of competition between (parametrically- dened) grammatical subsystems. Though this work puts the observation on a rmer mathematical foundation and relates it broadly ...

@unpublished{briscoe00anEvolutionary,
  author={E. J. Briscoe},
  title={An evolutionary approach to (logistic-like) language change},
  year={2000},
  note={Draft of DIGS6 talk, Maryland, 23rd May 2000 and Univ of Sussex, 8th Dec 2000},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/briscoe00anEvolutionary.html}
}

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