Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Trudgill (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.

If every productive form of linguistic expression can be described by some idealized human grammar, an individuals's variable linguistic behavior (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog, 1968) can be modeled as a statistical distribution of multiple idealized grammars. The distribution of grammars is determined by the interaction between the biological constraints on human grammar and the properties of linguistic data in the environment during the course of language acquisition. Such interaction can be formalized precisely and quantitatively in a mathematical model of language learning. Consequently, we model language change as the change in grammar distribution over time, which can be related to the statistical properties of historical linguistic data. As an empirical test, we apply the proposed model to explain the loss of the verb-second phenomenon in Old French and Old English based on corpus studies of historical texts.