How individuals change language

Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in the language, and many theoretical proposals exist. We introduce a very general mathematical model that encompasses a wide variety of individual-level linguistic behaviours and provides statistical predictions for the population-level changes that result from them. This model allows us to compare the likelihood of empirically-attested changes in definite and indefinite articles in multiple languages under different assumptions on the way in which individuals learn and use language. We find that accounts of language change that appeal primarily to errors in childhood language acquisition are very weakly supported by the historical data, whereas those that allow speakers to change incrementally across the lifespan are more plausible, particularly when combined with social network effects

Mixed accents: Scottish children with English parents

We discuss accent mixture and the creation of idiosyncratic phonological systems in acquisition, with a focus on Scottish English. Such mixing is in addition to the relatively stable sociolinguistic systems of variation expected within a speech community, and arises when parents have radically different accents from each other or from the child's peers or other adult models. In terms of traditional geographic dialectology, there are a number of isoglosses around the Scotland/England border, but modern social mobility means that in some Scottish cities there are large numbers of families with at least one non-Scottish adult accent acting as a model for acquisition, which may feed into phonological change. Of particular interest is the influence of Southern British English accents. We exemplify the issues with two short case studies. The first concerns a child with mixed Scottish/English input in the home. His speech patterns do indeed indicate the acquisition of a mixed system. The second focuses on inter-sibling variation, looking at two sibling pairs who exemplify a different mix of accent features from each other. We examine two main diagnostics: monophthongal vs. diphthongal productions of the vowels in FACE and GOAT; and rhoticity. We also describe a parental demographic and accent attitude questionnaire as part of Case Study 2. The results support the need for speaker-by-speaker study of how incompatibility between two target systems is handled. We conclude that descriptions of mixed accents should be more common in the literature and approached on a feature-by-feature basis to help develop models of accent interference.caslpub3959pu

'We went to the restroom or something'. General extenders and stuff in the speech of Dutch learners of English

This article investigates how learners of English who are native speakers of Dutch use general extenders such as 'and stuff' and 'or something'. The corpus consists of the Dutch component of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), which is comprised of fifty interviews of some fifteen minutes each. These data are compared with the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation (LOCNEC), LINDSEI’s native speaker reference corpus. The study shows that overall frequencies of general extenders point at a close alignment of the two speaker groups, but that discrepancies exist if these numbers are further broken down for the adjunctive and disjunctive categories of general extenders. The former type is used considerably less frequently in the learner corpus than in the native, whereas the opposite holds for the latter. A detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis offers a few tentative explanations for the learners’ choice of general extenders, most notably L1 transfer, the intensity of exposure to certain forms in the target language, and learners’ restricted repertoire of pragmatic devices.status: publishe

‘We Are Going to Do a Lot of Things for College Tuition’: Vague Language in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Debates

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