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Project

How predictable is language change? A quantitative approach.

At Present, there is fairly wide-spread pessimism about the predictability of language change. True enough, predicting when a particular change will emerge is next to impossible (Weinreich et al.’s 1968problem of actuation), but the process of propagation, i.e. the historical course of linguistic change is not haphazard. Like other social and natural phenomena – which also suffer from the problem of actuation, though to different degrees – propagation in language change is known to often follow an S- curve, with a slow onset, a rapid spread of an innovation in the middle, and a slow end phase. This trajectory can be mathematically modelled with the logistic equation.

Historical linguists have shown that the logistic curve is a good approximation of many of the changes they study, but they are generally not really interested in whether there is additional information in the residuals. The gold standard is to have an optimal fit between the curve and the data.

This project takes special interest in where the changes deviate from the model. It will be investigated to what extent 26 changes in 19th and 20th century Dutch follow the parametrized logistic S-curve, in order to determine under what circumstances the real course of change differs from the predicted one. More specifically, the regression parameter settings estimated on observed values from the period 1850-1949 in a register-stable acrolectal text corpus will be used to draw the future trajectory of the S-curve from 1950 to 1999. Subsequently, observed values from 1950 to 1999 will be compared to the predicted values, and for each of the 26 changes, mean standardized residuals will be calculated. Finally, the residual values will be clustered, allowing us to investigate whether residual clusters represent and distinguish different types of change.

Date:1 Oct 2018 →  13 Sep 2021
Keywords:historical linguistics, corpus linguistics
Disciplines:Computational linguistics, Mathematical linguistics
Project type:PhD project