The model of language change sketched here – the evolutionary-emergence model – takes the position that language is an emergent system within which language change can be modeled as an evolutionary process applied to the emergent properties of that system. Describing language as emergent entails that the complexity of the linguistic system is built out of smaller simple processes. Though theories of language change are often juxtaposed in opposition to one another, the approach taken here shows that each may be considered correct, at least in part, once the separate roles and expectations for speakers and hearers are disentangled. After sketching the evolutionary-emergence model of language change in terms of previous models of language change, data taken from “emerging adults” living in a dialect transition-zone are described within the framework of evolutionary-emergence model. The data under consideration are the TRAP, LOT, and THOUGHT vowels, specifically, the relationship of TRAP-retraction to the LOT/THOUGHT merger. The data presented here show that while the presence of TRAP-retraction and LOT/THOUGHT merger are positively correlated at the community level, there is no need to find this correlation at the level of individual speakers.
Unlike most work in the generative tradition, researchers employing usage-based models of language change (e.g. see the collection of papers in Barlow and Kemmer 2000) often incorporate variable data in their model building. Most of this variable data comes from large corpora. While this approach appreciates the importance of testing models of language change on observed language use, it is also problematic because it forces the researcher to test theories of language change on abstract language varieties such as ‘American English’. This is particularly problematic because the usage-based approach assumes that the speakers’ linguistic system is abstracted largely from their previous experience and, hence, that no two speakers will have the same grammar. This paper aims to redress this mismatch by considering the role of lexical frequency in a usage-based model of phonological change in light of new data that was collected from a relatively (geographically and socially) homogeneous group of speakers living within a single dialect area in east-central Scotland.
This paper investigates object clitic paradigms in a number of Ibero-Romance dialects. It claims that dialect areas can be extremely helpful in understanding linguistic change if carefully studied through an adequate structural analysis in conjunction with historical information. The paper, therefore, discusses the extent to which the relationship between social structure and linguistic change is relevant and suggests that the probability that innovations will emerge and diffuse is both structurally and socially conditioned. In the data analysed, the appearance of new grammatical distinctions, which are rare from a typological perspective, seems to be more frequent in stable societies with strong ties and little mobility, regardless of whether bilingualism is present. On the other hand, the loss of previously existing distinctions seems to occur more easily in social situations where speakers of different languages or dialects colonize new territories, bringing their varieties into contact with each other to form a new variety.
Universal properties of language constrain not only the languages themselves, but also which directions of change are possible. Implicational universals, where one linguistic property is seen to constrain, or in the weaker case, have a probabilistic influence upon the value of another parameter, have a more controversial relationship with language change. Some, e.g. Cysouw (2003a), have challenged the very validity of the notion of the implicational universal, with some welcome criticisms of its overuse. But if we still accept the notion, it is nevertheless evident that in the case of a probabilistic rather than an absolute implicational universal, we will be unable to establish an exceptionless pattern of change. This paper examines one ongoing change within Tunisian Arabic which is mediated by dialect contact. It suggests that for some changes induced by dialect contact, the question of the role of implicational universals in predicting and/or constraining outcomes of change is worth further investigation. This is based on a strong match observed between the route of change and an implicational universal.
The focus of this paper is on the genesis of the German recipient passive (German GET passive). Although much theoretical and empirical research has already been carried out, there are still a number of unresolved questions concerning this phenomenon. One central problem still disputed is the genesis of the passive construction. According to the research literature, (at least) two different historical pathways are plausible. In this paper, these hypotheses are evaluated against the results. of corpus analyses based on historical and current language data.
We examine a phonological change in progress in Tamang-Gurung-Thakali-Manangke (TGTM), a group of Tibeto-Burman dialects or languages of Nepal. Data from eight language varieties, five of them studied first-hand in the field, are presented. The phonological change studied is a modern-day instance of the tonal split which swept through the whole of Asia in the Middle Ages: Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and many less known languages underwent a merger of two of their series of initials (most commonly voiced/voiceless), resulting in a split of their tonal systems. Hypotheses about the modalities of implementation of this change have been offered, but modern day traces of intermediate stages are very limited. The languages of the Himalayas are situated at the geographical and chonological end of this wave so that the change is still in progress. In all the TGTM dialects studied here, the tonal split is phonologically completed, but traces of previous distinctions in manner of articulation and in phonation type survive, offering possible models for previously unobserved intermediate stages in tonogenesis. From the similarities and differences observed between the dialects, some conclusions can be drawn. In diachrony, the common passage by a breathy stage between consonant-borne voice contrasts and tone, which has been proposed for the pan-Asian tonal split, is corroborated for all TGTM languages. But after the phonologization of tone, the degree, modality and factors of retention of the old features of voice and breathiness differ from dialect to dialect. Building on the repetition of distinct but similar changes, a tentative “law” is proposed for the evolution of breathiness, emphasizing the interplay of phonetic and phonological constraints in historical development: in a language where breathiness is used as a cue to a given tone and is not an independent feature orthogonal to tone, it is retained only as long as the phonetic pitch of the tone remains low. For the synchronic analysis of linguistic states (which may last indefinitely) during which different cues contribute to the identification of a given “tone”, we propose that conceptualizing a toneme as a bundle of cues, some of them non-pitch features, rather than as defined by a single distinctive feature accompanied by “redundant” features may better account for the variability observed in tonal realization.
This work presents a variationist investigation of language change and the social factors motivating that change within the Fiji Islands at the level of dialect variation. In Fiji, urbanisation coupled with a growing sense of national identity is hypothesized to be effecting an unprecedented linguistic shift towards the standard dialect of the Fijian language and away from the country’s numerous distinct regional dialects. Urban communities with high socioeconomic status are predicted to be at the forefront of this shift, demonstrating a higher percentage of standard features in daily speech than their rural counterparts. Five social variables (Socioeconomic status, Gender, Education, Religion and Age) and two experimental design variables (Feature and Speech environment) comprised the parameters of this work. Language change was studied through a comparison of three age groups from two different villages according to their use of divergent linguistic features over three distinct dialects. Data was collected through a controlled, three-part dialogue. The data demonstrates that patterns of association between social variables and dialect choice are quite different between urban and rural Fijian villages. Rural communities with a comparatively low socioeconomic status appear to reliably follow the predicted intergenerational shift towards greater standard usage. However, though a greater percentage of standard usage has been evidenced in urbanised communities with a high socioeconomic status, intergenerational trends have been found to demonstrate a shift back to regional forms in some cases. Therefore, results only partially support the primary hypothesis that the Fijian language is undergoing a shift away from regional diversity in favour of the standard Fijian dialect.
This paper has three goals. First, it aims to illustrate how the problems derived from access to intricate diachronic empirical data can sometimes be informed by a careful look at interdialectal microvariation, in that this linguistic microvariation can sometimes help to explain why a phonological process applies or has applied. Second, it intends to show how some of the machineries developed within Optimality Theory to account for synchronic surface resemblances between the members of an inflectional paradigm can be applied to account for phonological change. Third, it attempts to demonstrate how the analysis of phonological change and linguistic variation in a specific linguistic variety and across nearby linguistic varieties can provide noteworthy insights about the architecture of these machineries. Overall, we provide significant empirical evidence, drawn from Catalan, Spanish and Occitan inflection, that analogy is exclusively induced by phonological markedness, that is, for concluding that what determines or governs the direction of the pressure is not a specific morphological status of a word but rather the need to respect phonological markedness.
The present contribution deals with synchronic variation in Dutch past tense regularization, focusing on cognitive and geolinguistic aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental data are presented from a production task and a series of acceptability judgments, carried out among a group of 240 native speaker respondents. An empirical overview shows the relative frequency of regularization, and patterns of regional divergence are highlighted and discussed. Theoretical implications are addressed within the framework of the past tense debate. Both the observed role of token frequency and the discrepancy between usage and acceptability data from a geolinguistic perspective are taken as evidence against traditional dual-route accounts. Further analyses of geographical variation in the findings consider the possibility of analogical support from homophonous regional forms.
Previous research on the universal directionality of the development of aspect markers classifies them into two categories (imperfective vs. perfective), claiming that each group takes a distinctive path of semantic shifts determined by the meanings of lexical items from which the aspect markers are derived. However, this binary classification cannot account for the grammaticalization in the eastern dialects of Japanese. Furthermore, the western Japanese dialects have recently developed a distinction between the simple present and the present imperfective, although previous research claims that language generally tends to show simpler aspectual marking in the present tense, the imperfective being indistinguishable from the present tense. In this paper, I analyze corpus data from the 8th to the 17th century Japanese, which show that four periphrastic expressions, -te wir-, -wir-, -te wor-, and -wor-, all indicated aspectual meanings at some point in history, although they underwent separate paths of development in the east and the west of Japan. I claim that the separation of perfect and progressive marking seen in the west of Japan gives rise to the possibility of further semantic changes, whereas the semantic complexity of the aspect marker in the eastern dialects prevents any similar type of semantic shift.
The traditional explanation of the emergence of DP-internal possessors (due to H. Paul and O. Behaghel) assumes a kind of structural reanalysis: The DP-internal possessor originated from an adverbal dative DP which became reanalysed as part of the possessee-DP since both DPs supposedly happened to appear adjacent in most cases. This paper proposes a new explanation, based on the development of possessive pronouns. Possessive pronouns evolved out of genitive forms of personal pronouns and Old High German still lacked true possessive pronouns. They developed into adjectives only later in the Middle High German period and into determiners in New High German. Adopting a small clause analysis for possessive constructions, the development of possessive pronouns and the emergence of DP-internal possessors can be reconstructed as follows: As personal pronouns they occupied the possessor position within the small clause, and only when they developed into adjectives and determiners, their base position must be higher within the DP leaving the DP-internal possessor position empty which thus could be filled by a full DP which then moves to Spec-DP. This possessor DP was originally case-marked with genitive and not with dative.
The model of language change sketched here – the evolutionary-emergence model – takes the position that language is an emergent system within which language change can be modeled as an evolutionary process applied to the emergent properties of that system. Describing language as emergent entails that the complexity of the linguistic system is built out of smaller simple processes. Though theories of language change are often juxtaposed in opposition to one another, the approach taken here shows that each may be considered correct, at least in part, once the separate roles and expectations for speakers and hearers are disentangled. After sketching the evolutionary-emergence model of language change in terms of previous models of language change, data taken from “emerging adults” living in a dialect transition-zone are described within the framework of evolutionary-emergence model. The data under consideration are the TRAP, LOT, and THOUGHT vowels, specifically, the relationship of TRAP-retraction to the LOT/THOUGHT merger. The data presented here show that while the presence of TRAP-retraction and LOT/THOUGHT merger are positively correlated at the community level, there is no need to find this correlation at the level of individual speakers.
Unlike most work in the generative tradition, researchers employing usage-based models of language change (e.g. see the collection of papers in Barlow and Kemmer 2000) often incorporate variable data in their model building. Most of this variable data comes from large corpora. While this approach appreciates the importance of testing models of language change on observed language use, it is also problematic because it forces the researcher to test theories of language change on abstract language varieties such as ‘American English’. This is particularly problematic because the usage-based approach assumes that the speakers’ linguistic system is abstracted largely from their previous experience and, hence, that no two speakers will have the same grammar. This paper aims to redress this mismatch by considering the role of lexical frequency in a usage-based model of phonological change in light of new data that was collected from a relatively (geographically and socially) homogeneous group of speakers living within a single dialect area in east-central Scotland.
This paper investigates object clitic paradigms in a number of Ibero-Romance dialects. It claims that dialect areas can be extremely helpful in understanding linguistic change if carefully studied through an adequate structural analysis in conjunction with historical information. The paper, therefore, discusses the extent to which the relationship between social structure and linguistic change is relevant and suggests that the probability that innovations will emerge and diffuse is both structurally and socially conditioned. In the data analysed, the appearance of new grammatical distinctions, which are rare from a typological perspective, seems to be more frequent in stable societies with strong ties and little mobility, regardless of whether bilingualism is present. On the other hand, the loss of previously existing distinctions seems to occur more easily in social situations where speakers of different languages or dialects colonize new territories, bringing their varieties into contact with each other to form a new variety.
Universal properties of language constrain not only the languages themselves, but also which directions of change are possible. Implicational universals, where one linguistic property is seen to constrain, or in the weaker case, have a probabilistic influence upon the value of another parameter, have a more controversial relationship with language change. Some, e.g. Cysouw (2003a), have challenged the very validity of the notion of the implicational universal, with some welcome criticisms of its overuse. But if we still accept the notion, it is nevertheless evident that in the case of a probabilistic rather than an absolute implicational universal, we will be unable to establish an exceptionless pattern of change. This paper examines one ongoing change within Tunisian Arabic which is mediated by dialect contact. It suggests that for some changes induced by dialect contact, the question of the role of implicational universals in predicting and/or constraining outcomes of change is worth further investigation. This is based on a strong match observed between the route of change and an implicational universal.
The focus of this paper is on the genesis of the German recipient passive (German GET passive). Although much theoretical and empirical research has already been carried out, there are still a number of unresolved questions concerning this phenomenon. One central problem still disputed is the genesis of the passive construction. According to the research literature, (at least) two different historical pathways are plausible. In this paper, these hypotheses are evaluated against the results. of corpus analyses based on historical and current language data.
We examine a phonological change in progress in Tamang-Gurung-Thakali-Manangke (TGTM), a group of Tibeto-Burman dialects or languages of Nepal. Data from eight language varieties, five of them studied first-hand in the field, are presented. The phonological change studied is a modern-day instance of the tonal split which swept through the whole of Asia in the Middle Ages: Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and many less known languages underwent a merger of two of their series of initials (most commonly voiced/voiceless), resulting in a split of their tonal systems. Hypotheses about the modalities of implementation of this change have been offered, but modern day traces of intermediate stages are very limited. The languages of the Himalayas are situated at the geographical and chonological end of this wave so that the change is still in progress. In all the TGTM dialects studied here, the tonal split is phonologically completed, but traces of previous distinctions in manner of articulation and in phonation type survive, offering possible models for previously unobserved intermediate stages in tonogenesis. From the similarities and differences observed between the dialects, some conclusions can be drawn. In diachrony, the common passage by a breathy stage between consonant-borne voice contrasts and tone, which has been proposed for the pan-Asian tonal split, is corroborated for all TGTM languages. But after the phonologization of tone, the degree, modality and factors of retention of the old features of voice and breathiness differ from dialect to dialect. Building on the repetition of distinct but similar changes, a tentative “law” is proposed for the evolution of breathiness, emphasizing the interplay of phonetic and phonological constraints in historical development: in a language where breathiness is used as a cue to a given tone and is not an independent feature orthogonal to tone, it is retained only as long as the phonetic pitch of the tone remains low. For the synchronic analysis of linguistic states (which may last indefinitely) during which different cues contribute to the identification of a given “tone”, we propose that conceptualizing a toneme as a bundle of cues, some of them non-pitch features, rather than as defined by a single distinctive feature accompanied by “redundant” features may better account for the variability observed in tonal realization.
This work presents a variationist investigation of language change and the social factors motivating that change within the Fiji Islands at the level of dialect variation. In Fiji, urbanisation coupled with a growing sense of national identity is hypothesized to be effecting an unprecedented linguistic shift towards the standard dialect of the Fijian language and away from the country’s numerous distinct regional dialects. Urban communities with high socioeconomic status are predicted to be at the forefront of this shift, demonstrating a higher percentage of standard features in daily speech than their rural counterparts. Five social variables (Socioeconomic status, Gender, Education, Religion and Age) and two experimental design variables (Feature and Speech environment) comprised the parameters of this work. Language change was studied through a comparison of three age groups from two different villages according to their use of divergent linguistic features over three distinct dialects. Data was collected through a controlled, three-part dialogue. The data demonstrates that patterns of association between social variables and dialect choice are quite different between urban and rural Fijian villages. Rural communities with a comparatively low socioeconomic status appear to reliably follow the predicted intergenerational shift towards greater standard usage. However, though a greater percentage of standard usage has been evidenced in urbanised communities with a high socioeconomic status, intergenerational trends have been found to demonstrate a shift back to regional forms in some cases. Therefore, results only partially support the primary hypothesis that the Fijian language is undergoing a shift away from regional diversity in favour of the standard Fijian dialect.
This paper has three goals. First, it aims to illustrate how the problems derived from access to intricate diachronic empirical data can sometimes be informed by a careful look at interdialectal microvariation, in that this linguistic microvariation can sometimes help to explain why a phonological process applies or has applied. Second, it intends to show how some of the machineries developed within Optimality Theory to account for synchronic surface resemblances between the members of an inflectional paradigm can be applied to account for phonological change. Third, it attempts to demonstrate how the analysis of phonological change and linguistic variation in a specific linguistic variety and across nearby linguistic varieties can provide noteworthy insights about the architecture of these machineries. Overall, we provide significant empirical evidence, drawn from Catalan, Spanish and Occitan inflection, that analogy is exclusively induced by phonological markedness, that is, for concluding that what determines or governs the direction of the pressure is not a specific morphological status of a word but rather the need to respect phonological markedness.
The present contribution deals with synchronic variation in Dutch past tense regularization, focusing on cognitive and geolinguistic aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental data are presented from a production task and a series of acceptability judgments, carried out among a group of 240 native speaker respondents. An empirical overview shows the relative frequency of regularization, and patterns of regional divergence are highlighted and discussed. Theoretical implications are addressed within the framework of the past tense debate. Both the observed role of token frequency and the discrepancy between usage and acceptability data from a geolinguistic perspective are taken as evidence against traditional dual-route accounts. Further analyses of geographical variation in the findings consider the possibility of analogical support from homophonous regional forms.
Previous research on the universal directionality of the development of aspect markers classifies them into two categories (imperfective vs. perfective), claiming that each group takes a distinctive path of semantic shifts determined by the meanings of lexical items from which the aspect markers are derived. However, this binary classification cannot account for the grammaticalization in the eastern dialects of Japanese. Furthermore, the western Japanese dialects have recently developed a distinction between the simple present and the present imperfective, although previous research claims that language generally tends to show simpler aspectual marking in the present tense, the imperfective being indistinguishable from the present tense. In this paper, I analyze corpus data from the 8th to the 17th century Japanese, which show that four periphrastic expressions, -te wir-, -wir-, -te wor-, and -wor-, all indicated aspectual meanings at some point in history, although they underwent separate paths of development in the east and the west of Japan. I claim that the separation of perfect and progressive marking seen in the west of Japan gives rise to the possibility of further semantic changes, whereas the semantic complexity of the aspect marker in the eastern dialects prevents any similar type of semantic shift.
The traditional explanation of the emergence of DP-internal possessors (due to H. Paul and O. Behaghel) assumes a kind of structural reanalysis: The DP-internal possessor originated from an adverbal dative DP which became reanalysed as part of the possessee-DP since both DPs supposedly happened to appear adjacent in most cases. This paper proposes a new explanation, based on the development of possessive pronouns. Possessive pronouns evolved out of genitive forms of personal pronouns and Old High German still lacked true possessive pronouns. They developed into adjectives only later in the Middle High German period and into determiners in New High German. Adopting a small clause analysis for possessive constructions, the development of possessive pronouns and the emergence of DP-internal possessors can be reconstructed as follows: As personal pronouns they occupied the possessor position within the small clause, and only when they developed into adjectives and determiners, their base position must be higher within the DP leaving the DP-internal possessor position empty which thus could be filled by a full DP which then moves to Spec-DP. This possessor DP was originally case-marked with genitive and not with dative.