Course Description
Languages change in predictable ways, following recurrent diachronic path ways. For example, coda fricatives reduce to [h] and eventually to nothing. The reverse directions of change are rare or unattested. The central premise of usage-based linguistics is that these path ways can be explained by cognitive, perceptual and articulatory processes operating in every instance of language use. This course surveys what is known about the recurrent pathways of change, and the explanations for them. Specific topics that will be covered are sound change (lenition, fortition and merger), the emergence and loss of exceptions (morphologization and analogical change), grammaticalization, semantic change, lexical replacement, and syntactic change. We will focus in particular on the roles of articulation, perception, form accessibility and analogy in these processes. We will read and discuss textbook chapters (from Language change by Joan Bybee) alongside primary research articles. The articles will introduce experimental paradigms for investigating the mechanisms responsible for change and computational models for simulating change. Specifically, we will introduce the core ideas of exemplar models, agent-based models of iterated learning and hierarchical Bayesian inference as they apply to language change.
Area Tags: Diachrony, Psycholinguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Semantics
(Sessions 1 & 2) Tuesday/Friday 9:00am – 10:20am
Location: ILC N400
Instructor: Vsevolod Kapatsinski
Vsevolod Kapatsinski is a Professor of linguistics at the University of Oregon. His research focused on explaining recurrent trajectories of language change, and on testing behavioral predictions of alternative views of learning using language learning data. His work uses quantitative corpus analysis of natural language data to identify phenomena to explain, combined with computational and experimental methods used to implement and test potential causal mechanisms. Much of his experimental work involves designing minimally-different miniature artificial languages, which enable empirical investigation of the direction of causality in the changes we see in real languages.
