This paper explores the hypothesis that morphotactically ambiguous segment sequences should be di... more This paper explores the hypothesis that morphotactically ambiguous segment sequences should be dispreferred and selected against in the evolution of languages. We define morphotactically ambiguous sequences as sequences that can occur both within morphemes and across boundaries, such as final /nd/ or /mz/ in ModE, which occur in simple forms like wind or alms and in complex ones like sinned or seems. We test the hypothesis in two diachronic corpus studies of Middle and Early Modern English word forms ending in clusters of sonorants followed by /d/ or /t/ and /s/ or /z/. These clusters became highly frequent after the loss of unstressed vowels in final syllables and were highly ambiguous when they emerged. Our data show that the ambiguity of these final clusters was indeed reduced so that the distribution of the final clusters became increasingly skewed: clusters ending in voiceless coronals became significantly clearly indicative of simple forms, while clusters ending in voiced ones...
This paper accounts for stress-pattern diversity in languages such as English, where words that a... more This paper accounts for stress-pattern diversity in languages such as English, where words that are otherwise equivalent in terms of phonotactic structure and morphosyntactic category can take both initial and final stress, as seen in ˈlentil – hoˈtel, ˈenvoy – deˈgree, ˈresearchN – reˈsearchN and ˈaccessV – acˈcessV. Addressing the problem in general and abstract terms, we identify systematic conditions under which stress-pattern diversity becomes stable. We hypothesise that words adopt stress patterns that produce, on average, the best possible phrase-level rhythm. We model this hypothesis in evolutionary game theory, predict that stress-pattern diversity among polysyllabic word forms depends on the frequency of monosyllables and demonstrate how that prediction is met both in Present-Day English and in its history.
Linguistic variation is constrained by grammatical and social context, making the occurrence of p... more Linguistic variation is constrained by grammatical and social context, making the occurrence of particular variants at least somewhat predictable. We explore accommodation during interaction as a potential mechanism to explain this phenomenon. Specifically, we test a hypothesis derived from historical linguistics that interaction between categorical and variable users is inherently asymmetric: while variable users accommodate to their partners, categorical users are reluctant to do so, because it would mean violating the rules of their grammar. We ran two experiments in which participants learnt a miniature language featuring a variable or categorical grammatical marker and then used it to communicate. Our results support the asymmetric accommodation hypothesis: variably-trained participants accommodated to their categorically-trained partners, who tended not to change their behaviour during interaction. These results may reflect general social cognitive constraints on acquiring and...
We address the question of when, how and why highly marked rhymes of the structure VVCC (as in go... more We address the question of when, how and why highly marked rhymes of the structure VVCC (as in gold, false or bind) came to be established in the lexical phonotactics of English. Specifically, we discuss two hypotheses. The first is that lexical VVCC clusters owe their existence to the fact that similar rhyme structures are produced routinely in verbal past tenses and third-person singular present tense forms (fails, fined), and in nominal plurals (goals, signs), The other is based on the insight emerging in morphonotactic research (Dressler & Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2006) that languages tend to avoid homophonies between lexical and morphotactically produced structures. We hold both hypotheses against a body of OED and corpus data, reconstruct the phases in which the lexical VVCC rhymes that are still attested in Present-day English emerged, and relate them to the phases in which productive inflectional rules came to produce rhymes of the same type. We show that the emergence of morphot...
Selim Journal of the Spanish Society For Medieval English Language and Literature Revista De La Sociedad Espanola De Lengua Y Literatura Inglesa Medieval, 2009
Recent developments in linguistics have come to foreground, once again, the inherent historicity ... more Recent developments in linguistics have come to foreground, once again, the inherent historicity of human language(s). Both descriptive and theoretical work is increasingly corpus based and highlights that synchronic and diachronic variation are two sides of the same coin. In research fields like grammaticalisation, the synchrony vs. diachrony distinction appears not to matter much in practice (e.g. Heine 2003), and seminal studies like Blevins' Evolutionary Phonology (2004) have demon-strated that many apparent constraints on viable phonological systems can be naturally derived from the obvious fact that such systems and their constituents depend – for their lives, one might say – on being transmitted among speakers and generations of such. Of course, sociolinguistic approaches to language variation (e.g. Labov (ed.) 1980) have long recognised that synchrony and diachrony are inseparably intertwined, and also functionalist theories of language appeal to patterns in language cha...
0. Abstract In its first part, the paper points out that, while there is no aspect of linguistic ... more 0. Abstract In its first part, the paper points out that, while there is no aspect of linguistic research which does not depend more or less directly on meaning, academic linguistic discourse on its ontological status tends to be inconclusive, and no clear position is taken on the possibility, explored in neighbouring disciplines, that meaning might be reduced to its material substrate. In the second part, it is shown how John Searle's well-known Chinese room experiment may be used as a template against which linguistic theories can be held in order to bring their hidden assumptions about the status of meaning to the open. The exercise is carried out on Dressler's semiotic version of Natural Linguistics and on Chomsky's generative model of language. It is shown that both paradigms construe meaning in a way that is incompatible with a materialist interpretation.
This paper explores the hypothesis that morphotactically ambiguous segment sequences should be di... more This paper explores the hypothesis that morphotactically ambiguous segment sequences should be dispreferred and selected against in the evolution of languages. We define morphotactically ambiguous sequences as sequences that can occur both within morphemes and across boundaries, such as final /nd/ or /mz/ in ModE, which occur in simple forms like wind or alms and in complex ones like sinned or seems. We test the hypothesis in two diachronic corpus studies of Middle and Early Modern English word forms ending in clusters of sonorants followed by /d/ or /t/ and /s/ or /z/. These clusters became highly frequent after the loss of unstressed vowels in final syllables and were highly ambiguous when they emerged. Our data show that the ambiguity of these final clusters was indeed reduced so that the distribution of the final clusters became increasingly skewed: clusters ending in voiceless coronals became significantly clearly indicative of simple forms, while clusters ending in voiced ones...
This paper accounts for stress-pattern diversity in languages such as English, where words that a... more This paper accounts for stress-pattern diversity in languages such as English, where words that are otherwise equivalent in terms of phonotactic structure and morphosyntactic category can take both initial and final stress, as seen in ˈlentil – hoˈtel, ˈenvoy – deˈgree, ˈresearchN – reˈsearchN and ˈaccessV – acˈcessV. Addressing the problem in general and abstract terms, we identify systematic conditions under which stress-pattern diversity becomes stable. We hypothesise that words adopt stress patterns that produce, on average, the best possible phrase-level rhythm. We model this hypothesis in evolutionary game theory, predict that stress-pattern diversity among polysyllabic word forms depends on the frequency of monosyllables and demonstrate how that prediction is met both in Present-Day English and in its history.
Linguistic variation is constrained by grammatical and social context, making the occurrence of p... more Linguistic variation is constrained by grammatical and social context, making the occurrence of particular variants at least somewhat predictable. We explore accommodation during interaction as a potential mechanism to explain this phenomenon. Specifically, we test a hypothesis derived from historical linguistics that interaction between categorical and variable users is inherently asymmetric: while variable users accommodate to their partners, categorical users are reluctant to do so, because it would mean violating the rules of their grammar. We ran two experiments in which participants learnt a miniature language featuring a variable or categorical grammatical marker and then used it to communicate. Our results support the asymmetric accommodation hypothesis: variably-trained participants accommodated to their categorically-trained partners, who tended not to change their behaviour during interaction. These results may reflect general social cognitive constraints on acquiring and...
We address the question of when, how and why highly marked rhymes of the structure VVCC (as in go... more We address the question of when, how and why highly marked rhymes of the structure VVCC (as in gold, false or bind) came to be established in the lexical phonotactics of English. Specifically, we discuss two hypotheses. The first is that lexical VVCC clusters owe their existence to the fact that similar rhyme structures are produced routinely in verbal past tenses and third-person singular present tense forms (fails, fined), and in nominal plurals (goals, signs), The other is based on the insight emerging in morphonotactic research (Dressler & Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2006) that languages tend to avoid homophonies between lexical and morphotactically produced structures. We hold both hypotheses against a body of OED and corpus data, reconstruct the phases in which the lexical VVCC rhymes that are still attested in Present-day English emerged, and relate them to the phases in which productive inflectional rules came to produce rhymes of the same type. We show that the emergence of morphot...
Selim Journal of the Spanish Society For Medieval English Language and Literature Revista De La Sociedad Espanola De Lengua Y Literatura Inglesa Medieval, 2009
Recent developments in linguistics have come to foreground, once again, the inherent historicity ... more Recent developments in linguistics have come to foreground, once again, the inherent historicity of human language(s). Both descriptive and theoretical work is increasingly corpus based and highlights that synchronic and diachronic variation are two sides of the same coin. In research fields like grammaticalisation, the synchrony vs. diachrony distinction appears not to matter much in practice (e.g. Heine 2003), and seminal studies like Blevins' Evolutionary Phonology (2004) have demon-strated that many apparent constraints on viable phonological systems can be naturally derived from the obvious fact that such systems and their constituents depend – for their lives, one might say – on being transmitted among speakers and generations of such. Of course, sociolinguistic approaches to language variation (e.g. Labov (ed.) 1980) have long recognised that synchrony and diachrony are inseparably intertwined, and also functionalist theories of language appeal to patterns in language cha...
0. Abstract In its first part, the paper points out that, while there is no aspect of linguistic ... more 0. Abstract In its first part, the paper points out that, while there is no aspect of linguistic research which does not depend more or less directly on meaning, academic linguistic discourse on its ontological status tends to be inconclusive, and no clear position is taken on the possibility, explored in neighbouring disciplines, that meaning might be reduced to its material substrate. In the second part, it is shown how John Searle's well-known Chinese room experiment may be used as a template against which linguistic theories can be held in order to bring their hidden assumptions about the status of meaning to the open. The exercise is carried out on Dressler's semiotic version of Natural Linguistics and on Chomsky's generative model of language. It is shown that both paradigms construe meaning in a way that is incompatible with a materialist interpretation.
In the 20 th century] biological models and concepts were [….] seen as inappropriate and even dis... more In the 20 th century] biological models and concepts were [….] seen as inappropriate and even distasteful. Evolution in particular, ha[d] become a 'dirty word' in […] linguistic theory. MacMahon 1994: 314 A brief argument Premise (1) A linguistic code (langue, knowledge of how to communicate in a language) is a set of constituents (signs, rules) that represent institutional facts (cf. John Searle) and are established by shared knowledge of them. Premise (2) Being shared implies having been transmitted among speakers through communication, acquisition and/or learning.
A Lotka-Volterra model of the evolutionary dynamics of compositionality markers Linguistic Mimicr... more A Lotka-Volterra model of the evolutionary dynamics of compositionality markers Linguistic Mimicry Simple. The cluster [nd] occurs within the morphologically simple form find and thus does not function as a compositionality marker. Complex. The cluster [nd] spans a morpheme boundary between the base sign and the suffixed , and consequently functions as a compositionality marker signalling morphological complexity. Can formal modelling shed light on how compositionality marker ambiguity evolves? [saɪn-d] [faɪnd] 1a. The model: The colour pattern of wasps signals that they are venomous. 1b. The mimic: Hoverflies, among other species, imitate the colour pattern of wasps in order to appear poisonous as well. 2. The two types of Heliconius butterflies mimic each other to confuse predators.
This paper represents a first and preliminary report on a corpus-based research project investiga... more This paper represents a first and preliminary report on a corpus-based research project investigating the impact of gender binarism on language use in diachronic terms. Its agenda is partly empirical and partly methodological. On the one hand, we ask whether large diachronic corpora can provide evidence of historical changes in the overall extent to which language use reflects the impact of binary, hetero-normative conceptualizations of gender, and if so, what historical trends can be derived from them. On the other hand, we ask whether these questions can be addressed with established corpus-linguistic methods such as the identification of (relative) collocational affinities. In line with current research, our project understands 'gender binarism' as the socially constructed view that (a) humans can be sorted into two subtypes, namely 'females' and
Uploads
Papers by Nikolaus Ritt