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Niyogi, P. and Berwick, R. C. (1997) A Dynamical Systems Model for Language Change. Complex Systems, 11:161--204.
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MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY
and
CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING
DEPARTMENT OF BRAIN AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES
A.I. Memo No. 1515 March, 1995
C.B.C.L. Paper No. 114
A Dynamical Systems Model for Language
Change
Partha Niyogi & Robert C. Berwick
This publication can be retrieved by anonymous ftp to publications.ai.mit.edu.
Abstract Formalizing linguists' intuitions of language change as a dynamical system, we quantify the time course of language change including sudden vs. gradual changes in languages. We apply the computer model to the historical loss of Verb Second from Old French to modern French, showing that otherwise adequate grammatical theories can fail our new evolutionary criterion. Copyright c fl Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995 This report describes research done at the Center for Biological and Computational Learning and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the Center is provided in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation under contract ASC--9217041. Robert C. Berwick was also supported by Vinton­Hayes Fellowship.
1 Introduction Language scientists have long been occupied with de­ scribing phonological, syntactic, and semantic change, often appealing to an analogy between language change and evolution, but rarely going beyond this. For in­ stance, Lightfoot (1991, chapter 7, pp. 163--65ff.) talks about language change in this way: ``Some general prop­ erties of language change are shared by other dynamic systems in the natural world 1 . Here we formalize these intuitions, to the best of our knowledge for first time, as a concrete, computational, dynamical systems model, investigating its consequences. Specifically, we show that a computational population language change model emerges as a natural consequence of individual language learnability Our computational model establishes the fol­ lowing: ffl Learnability ...
BibTex
@article{niyogi97aDynamical,
  author={P. Niyogi and R. C. Berwick},
  title={A Dynamical Systems Model for Language Change},
  journal={Complex Systems},
  year={1997},
  volume={11},
  pages={161-204},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/niyogi97aDynamical.html}
}

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