AaL Wiklund

Agnes Fritzenschaft

Akira Watanabe

Anders Holmberg

Angelika Kratzer

Anna-Lena Wiklund

Anthony Kroch

Anthony S Kroch

Beatrice Santorini

Bernhard Rohrbacher

Caroline Heycock

Cecilia Falk

Charles Yang

Christian Waldmann

Clark Brady

Daniel Nettle

David Lightfoot

Dianne Jonas

Einar Haugen

Gisela Håkansson

Höskuldur Thráinsson

Ian Roberts

Joel Wallenberg

John D Sundquist

Jonathan Bobaljik

Joseph Greenberg

Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson

Kristine Bentzen

Liliane Haegeman

Marit Julien

Martin A Nowak

Olaf Koeneman

Patrick Moran

Peter Trudgill

Rasmus Kristian Rask

Robert Bush

Robin Clark

Simon Kirby

Sten Vikner

William Labov

Wim Kosmeijer

Ásgrímur Angantýsson

Crossref

The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics

How variational acquisition drives syntactic change

Although language acquisition is frequently invoked as a cause of syntactic change, there has been relatively little work applying a formal model of acquisition to an actual case of language change and testing its predictions empirically. Here we test the model of Yang (2000) on the historical case of the loss of verb movement to Tense (V-to-T) in Faroese and Mainland Scandinavian, using quantitative data from a number of corpora. We show that the model straightforwardly predicts the historical data, given minimal and uncontroversial assumptions about Scandinavian syntax. In contrast to a number of previous attempts to explain this repeated pattern of change, it is not necessary to appeal to any bias against learning structures involving V-to-T—a welcome result, given current evidence from acquisition. The newer V-in-situ parameter setting overcomes the original V-to-T grammar because it is more learnable in a language that also has embedded verb-second (EV2). Finally, we argue that the course of the diachronic change is evidence against a strong version of the "Rich Agreement Hypothesis" (RAH), but that under this account the stability of V-to-T in Icelandic provides evidence for the weaker version (cf. Bobaljik 2002)

Heycock, Caroline

Joel, Wallenberg

Edinburgh Research Explorer

How variational acquisition drives syntactic change:The loss of verb movement in Scandinavian

Although language acquisition is frequently invoked as a cause of syntactic change, there has been relatively little work applying a formal model of acquisition to an actual case of language change and testing its predictions empirically. Here we test the model of Yang (Language Variation and Change 12: 231-250, 2000) on the historical case of the loss of verb movement to Tense (V-to-T) in Faroese and Mainland Scandinavian, using quantitative data from a number of corpora. We show that the model straightforwardly predicts the historical data, given minimal and uncontroversial assumptions about Scandinavian syntax. In contrast to a number of previous attempts to explain this repeated pattern of change, it is not necessary to appeal to any bias against learning structures involving V-to-T-a welcome result, given current evidence from acquisition. The newer V-in-situ parameter setting overcomes the original V-to-T grammar because it is more learnable in a language that also has embedded verb-second (EV2). Finally, we argue that the course of the diachronic change is evidence against a strong version of the "Rich Agreement Hypothesis" (RAH), but that under this account the stability of V-to-T in Icelandic provides evidence for the weaker version (cf. Bobaljik, Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 6: 129-167, 2002)

Heycock C

Wallenberg J

Newcastle University E-Prints

https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/files/15115296/Heycock_2013_How_variational_acquisition_drives_syntactic_change.pdf

How variational acquisition drives syntactic change:The loss of verb movement in Scandinavian

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Edinburgh Research Explorer

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