Grammatical change in populations
Richard Blythe (Edinburgh)
Tuesday 15 November 2016, 11:00–12:30
1.17 Dugald Stewart Building
Language change is an inherently multiscale phenomenon, with structure and change at the population scale originating in the linguistic behaviour of individual speakers. Studies conducted separately at the two levels show certain parallels, for example, that individual biases observed in artificial language learning experiments tend to favour the structures that are more widely observed across the world’s languages. However, these can interact with a whole host of other factors, such as the communicative goals of the speaker, the human perceptual system, social network structure and so on, any or all of which could shape language structure and change on the path from the individual to the population. In this talk I will introduce an agent-based model that allows a wide range of factors to be included at the individual level and attempt to establish the relative importance of these factors in generating population-level changes that are consistent with the history of article grammaticalisation cycles.