Speaker
George Walkden
(University of Konstanz)
Description
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 unifying competing grammars and FOFC, and show that it makes interesting predictions about usage, stored probabilities and diachronic change. I will also show how this reasoning is also applicable to universals other than FOFC, such as Blake’s hierarchy of case systems, in a way that is consistent with the available corpus evidence.
