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Variation Rolls the Dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene
Edited by Enoch O. Aboh and Cécile B. Vigouroux
[Contact Language Library 59] 2021
► pp. 289–305

Learnability and ecological factors as motivators of language change

| URPP Language and Space, University of Zurich

This chapter adopts Mufwene’s (2001) framework according to which language acquisition is a process whereby competition and selection of linguistic features from the inputs create a unique idiolect. It examines the principles of selection of a given feature over others, and the mechanisms by which a feature spreads across a community (i.e., from one idiolect to another). These questions are addressed at the individual and population levels by analysing data from a twitter corpus. The frequency of a feature in the input as well as a suggested learnability factor are relevant to this discussion. Learnability is defined as the combination of the specific linguistic properties of a linguistic feature, and the universal human capacity to learn those specific properties.

Keywords: learnability, competition, selection, language-change, acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Dutch gender acquisition
  • 4.Selection
  • 5.Feature spread
    • 5.1Twitter
      • 5.1.1Methodology
      • 5.1.2Results
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 12 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.59.12efr
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