This talk picks up on work conducted with colleagues on the project 'Constraints on the Adaptiveness of Information in Language (CAIL)’,
which involved using information theory to analyze linguistic optionality and its cognitive scaffolding. Building on seminal work by Fenk and Fenk (1980, see also Fenk-Oczlon, 2001 and many subs), we suggest that linguistic planning is adapted for noise...
Estimating linguistic pasts is difficult in general, and grammatical change appears harder to predict than lexical. In this talk, I disentangle the fundamental principles of the traditional Historical Linguistics (HL) toolkit and how it relates to computational approaches. I contrast the task of reconstruction in linguistics to that of Ancestral State Reconstruction in biology, highlighting,...
In order to understand syntactic change, it is useful to be able to mine parsed corpora for relevant data - the larger, the better. State-of-the-art parsers now parse ever larger amounts of text, but their output generally does not include information of interest to linguists, such as grammatical functions or empty categories. So parsed corpora that are manually annotated for such...
This paper reports on a research project investigating prepositional phrases in verbal argument structure patterns in the history of English: Prepositional marking as a more analytic means of expression presumably increased in use over time (concurrent to a loss of morphological case marking and fixation of constituent order), with prepositions gradually taking on more grammatical, ‘core’...
Two decades after its introduction, the variational learner (Yang 2002) forms an essential part of the mathematically-minded diachronist's toolkit. This model of language acquisition, together with its inter-generational predictions about language change, has been applied to a wide array of phenomena ranging from word order change to morphological simplification. I begin this talk by reviewing...
Evolutionary models of genetic drift have been successfully applied in the last decade to the analysis of diachronic change in corpus data. Amongst all of them, the Wright-Fisher model stands out as a simple but powerful paradigm that is mathematically equivalent to models of the cultural transmission of language, like Iterated Bayesian Learning and the Utterance Selection Model. Wright Fisher...
At its simplest, grammar competition is the view that individuals associate linguistic variants with probabilities as part of their knowledge, and that these probabilities are reflected in usage. Roberts (2021) has suggested that the grammar-competition worldview is unable to handle a well-motivated linguistic universal, the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC). In this talk I sketch a way of...
