Speaker
Description
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 the fundamental properties of variational learning, as traditionally understood. I then move on to discuss two extensions of the basic model: multi-population and multi-grammar variational learning dynamics, including an application to sociolinguistic typology. As a positive formal contribution, I present a sufficient condition for the global asymptotic dominance of a single grammar in multi-grammar competition.
