The rise of the verbal weak inflection in Germanic: An agent-based model Vrije Universiteit Brussel
The verbal weak inflection, one of the defining innovations of Proto-Germanic, currently holds a dominant position in the verbal inventory of most remaining Germanic languages. This has not always been the case, though. This paper investigates how the weak inflection could have grown to overthrow its competitor, the strong inflection, even if (i) the strong inflection was still more regular and (ii) the weak inflection had to start from a ...