Revisiting the five foundational problems of Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968) Universiteit Gent
In their seminal paper “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change”, Weinreich et al. (1968) set out five problems that according to them, any theory of language change needs to address. The constraints problem deals with the limits to possible changes, while the transitions problem asks what concrete stages are needed to account for a change. The embedding problem is concerned with the language internal and external factors that may ...