Event

Jordan Kodner is happy to announce his dissertation, "Language Acquisition in the Past," which will be defended on Wednesday April 2020 at 9:00am EDT. The defense is public, and all are welcome to attend. A link to the dissertation and an abstract can be found below.

Title: Language Acquisition in the Past

Supervisors: Charles Yang, Mitch Marcus

Committee: Don Ringe, George Walkden 

Date: April 22nd

Time: 9:00am EDT

Abstract:

There is a long tradition in linguistics implicating child language acquisition as a major driver of language change, the classic intuition being that innovations or "errors" which emerge during the acquisition process may occasionally propagate through through speech communities and accumulate as change over time. In order to better understand this relationship, I establish new methods for reasoning about language acquisition in the past. I demonstrate that certain aspects of child linguistic experience may be reasonably estimated from historical corpora and employ a quantitative model of productivity learning to investigate the role acquisition played as the driver of four well-documented instances of phonological, syntactic, and morphological change: transparent /aɪ/-raising in modern North American English, the innovation and lexical spread of the to-dative in Middle English, the analogy of the lengthened *ē-grade in Proto-Germanic strong verbs, and the forms of the past participles and "t-deverbals" in Classical and Late Latin. These case studies provide new insights into the implications of sparsity and variation on the first language acquisition process, the role that acquisition plays as the actuator of community-level change, and the complementary nature of acquisition and diachronic evidence for synchronic representation.