Speaker
Description
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 particular, the difficulty of determining appropriate data for historical modelling (cf. Walkden 2013; Evans 2021). Many sources of data for grammatical change lack the structure that lexical material has of parts within words corresponding to parts in other words - and the words themselves are cognates. This kind of cognacy-pattern is hard to find in grammatical data. The dearth of such patterns and/or the difficulty finding them may warrant other ways of evaluating data such as the permanency of structures independent of their content (cf. Goddard 1994; Evans 2003; Ross 2004) or phylogenetic signal (Skirgård 2024). Furthermore, the dynamics of grammatical change are likely to be subject to pressures hitherto not modelled explicitly, such as those discussed in the workshop proposal: communicative need, social factors, and learning biases. There may also be influences from neurolinguistic processing (Bickel et al 2015) and demographic correlates (Wray & Grace 2007; Greenhill 2015; Raviv et al. 2019; Shcherbakova et al. 2023). Outlining several case studies, I want to illustrate that the existing toolkit in historical linguistics is currently underdeveloped to address grammatical change. I suggest possible approaches to proceed by.
References
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