Abstract
Acquisition is an intuitive place to look for explanation in language change. Each child must learn their individual grammar(s) via the indirect process of analyzing the output of others’ grammars, and the process necessarily involves social transmission over several years. On the basis of child language learning behaviors, I ask whether it is reasonable to expect the incrementation (advancement) of new variants to be kicked off by and sustained by the acquisition process. I discuss literature on how children respond to input variation, and a series of new studies experimentally testing incrementation, and argue that at least for some phenomena, young children overgeneralize innovative variants beyond their input. I sketch a model of incrementation based on initial overgeneralization, and offer further thoughts on next steps. Much collaborative work remains to precisely link analogous dynamic phenomena in learning and change.
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- A developmental view on incrementation in language change
- Computational historical linguistics
- Complexity as L2-difficulty: Implications for syntactic change
- Comments
- Children always go beyond the input: The Maximise Minimal Means perspective
- Overgeneralization and change: The role of acquisition in diachrony
- On computational historical linguistics in the 21st century
- Beyond edit distances: Comparing linguistic reconstruction systems
- Some thoughts on the complexity of syntactic complexity
- Are uninterpretable features vulnerable?
- Uninterpretable features in learning and alternative grammars?
- Replies
- Grammatical representations versus productive patterns in change theories
- Model evaluation in computational historical linguistics
- Interpreting (un)interpretability
- Edit Doron (1951–2019)
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- A developmental view on incrementation in language change
- Computational historical linguistics
- Complexity as L2-difficulty: Implications for syntactic change
- Comments
- Children always go beyond the input: The Maximise Minimal Means perspective
- Overgeneralization and change: The role of acquisition in diachrony
- On computational historical linguistics in the 21st century
- Beyond edit distances: Comparing linguistic reconstruction systems
- Some thoughts on the complexity of syntactic complexity
- Are uninterpretable features vulnerable?
- Uninterpretable features in learning and alternative grammars?
- Replies
- Grammatical representations versus productive patterns in change theories
- Model evaluation in computational historical linguistics
- Interpreting (un)interpretability
- Edit Doron (1951–2019)