Modeling Language Change: The Pitfall of Grammaticalization

AbstractThe St. Louis Corridor extending from Chicago, Illinois to St. Louis, Missouri has been described as a “breach” through the Midlands dialect region because of the presence of Inland North features there. Most notably, features associated with the Northern Cities Shift suddenly appeared in Corridor cities in the mid-twentieth century, but they have since largely retreated. Friedman's (2014) population study has uncovered complex relationships between the Corridor's geography and this pattern of advance and retreat, and this work elaborates on that investigation through computational simulations of the Corridor's population structure. Implementing a new network-analytic population model (Kodner & Cerezo Falco, 2018), I find support for Friedman's original hypothesis that migration into cities along Route 66 imported Inland North features into the Corridor first before it spread outward to communities farther away from the route and uncover questions about the Corridor's population that merit further study.

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Modeling language change across the lifespan: Individual trajectories in community change

Language Variation and Change ◽

10.1017/s0954394516000077 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 28 (2) ◽

pp. 129-173 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Gareth Baxter ◽

William Croft

Keyword(s):

Mathematical Model ◽

Social Networks ◽

Language Change ◽

Community Change ◽

Modeling Language ◽

Childhood And Adolescence ◽

Individual Change ◽

Differential Weighting ◽

The Mean ◽

Time Construct

AbstractWe use a mathematical model to examine three phenomena involving language change across the lifespan: the apparent time construct, the adolescent peak, and two different patterns of individual change. The apparent time construct is attributed to a decline in flexibility toward language change over one's lifetime; this explanation is borne out in our model. The adolescent peak has been explained by social networks: children interact more with caregivers a generation older until later childhood and adolescence. We find that the peak also occurs with many other network structures, so the peak is not specifically due to caregiver interaction. The two patterns of individual change are one in which most individuals change gradually, following the mean of community change, and another in which most individuals have more categorical behavior and change rapidly if they change at all. Our model suggests that they represent different balances between the differential weighting of competing variants and degree of accommodation to other speakers.

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Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers

Journal of Cultural Analytics ◽

10.22148/001c.18841 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Sandeep Soni ◽

Lauren F. Klein ◽

Jacob Eisenstein

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Language Change ◽

Modeling Language

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Modeling language change: An evaluation of Trudgill's theory of the emergence of New Zealand English

Language Variation and Change ◽

10.1017/s095439450999010x ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 21 (2) ◽

pp. 257-296 ◽

Cited By ~ 68

Author(s):

Gareth J. Baxter ◽

Richard A. Blythe ◽

William Croft ◽

Alan J. McKane

Keyword(s):

Mathematical Modeling ◽

Mathematical Model ◽

New Zealand ◽

Empirical Data ◽

Language Change ◽

Linguistic Knowledge ◽

Neutral Evolution ◽

Modeling Language ◽

Frequency Of Occurrence ◽

Plausible Model

AbstractTrudgill (2004) proposed that the emergence of New Zealand English, and of isolated new dialects generally, is purely deterministic. It can be explained solely in terms of the frequency of occurrence of particular variants and the frequency of interactions between different speakers in the society. Trudgill's theory is closely related to usage-based models of language, in which frequency plays a role in the representation of linguistic knowledge and in language change. Trudgill's theory also corresponds to a neutral evolution model of language change. We use a mathematical model based on Croft's usage-based evolutionary framework for language change (Baxter, Blythe, Croft, & McKane, 2006), and investigate whether Trudgill's theory is a plausible model of the emergence of new dialects. The results of our modeling indicate that determinism cannot be a sufficient mechanism for the emergence of a new dialect. Our approach illustrates the utility of mathematical modeling of theories and of empirical data for the study of language change.

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