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Abstract

Linguists' intuitions about language change can be captured by a dynamical systems model derived from the dynamics of language acquisition. Rather than having to posit a separate model for diachronic change, as has sometimes been done by drawing on assumptions from population biology (cf. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1973; 1981; Kroch, 1990), this new model dispenses with these independent assumptions by showing how the behavior of individual language learners leads to emergent, global population characteristics of linguistic communities over several generations. As the simplest case, we formalize the example of two grammars and show that even this situation leads directly to a nonlinear (quadratic) dynamical system. We study this one parameter model in a variety of situations for different kinds of acquisition algorithms and maturational times, showing how different learning theories can have very different evolutionary consequences. This allows us to formulate an evolutionary criterion for the adequacy of grammatical and learning theories. An application of the computational model to the historical loss of Verb Second from Old French to Modern French is described showing how otherwise adequate grammatical theories might fail the evolutionary criterion.

@article{niyogi97evolutionaryConsequences,
  author={P. Niyogi and R. C. Berwick},
  title={Evolutionary Consequences of Language Learning},
  journal={Linguistics and Philosophy},
  year={1997},
  volume={20},
  number={6},
  pages={697-719},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/niyogi97evolutionaryConsequences.html}
}

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