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Although language acquisition is frequently invoked as a cause of syntactic change, there has been relatively little work applying a formal model of acquisition to an actual case of language change and testing its predictions empirically. Here we test the model of Yang (2000) on the historical case of the loss of verb movement to Tense (V-toT) in Faroese and Mainland Scandinavian, using quantitative data from a number of corpora. We show that the model straightforwardly predicts the historical data, given minimal and uncontroversial assumptions about Scandinavian syntax. In contrast to a number of previous attempts to explain this repeated pattern of change, it is not necessary to appeal to any bias against learning structures involving V-toT a welcome result, given current evidence from acquisition. The newer V-in-situ parameter setting overcomes the original V-toT grammar because it is more learnable in a language that also has embedded verb-second (EV2). Finally, we argue that the course of the diachronic change is evidence against a strong version of the "Rich Agreement Hypothesis" (RAH), but that under this account the stability of V-toT in Icelandic provides evidence for the weaker version (cf. Bobaljik 2002).

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This paper investigates the relationship between organizational effects of pre-natal testosterone and the use of "tomboy" as a descriptor for young women. We show in a sample of 44 women that a woman's right hand 2D:4D ratio is a significant predictor of whether they will be labeled as a "tomboy", with a decrease in 2D:4D ratio corresponding to an increase in the probability of being called "tomboy". Taking the right hand 2D:4D ratio as a proxy for the abundance of testosterone in the early life hormonal milieu, we propose that organizing effects of higher pre-natal T lead to increased masculine-typical behavior in childhood, which increases the likelihood some women will be referred to as tomboys. We suggest that the increase in masculine-typical behaviors is a result of how the organizing effects of T on the brain interact with children's social modeling of male-coded and female-coded behaviors.

Data driven POS tagging has achieved good performance for English, but can still lag behind linguistic rule based taggers for morphologically complex languages, such as Icelandic. We extend a statistical tagger to handle fine grained tagsets and improve over the best Icelandic POS tagger. Additionally, we develop a case tagger for non-local case and gender decisions. An error analysis of our system suggests future directions.

A large body of recent work argues that considerations of information density predict various phenomena in linguistic planning and production. However, the usefulness of an information theoretic account for explaining diachronic phenomena has remained under-explored. Here, we test the idea that speakers prefer informationally uniform utterances on diachronic data from historical English and Icelandic. Our results show that: (i) the information density approach allows us to predict that Subject and Object type will affect the frequencies of OV and VO in specific ways, creating a complex Constant Rate Effect, (ii) the bias towards information uniformity explains this CRE and may help to explain others, and (iii) communities of speakers are constant in their average target level of information uniformity over long periods of historical time. This finding is consistent with an understanding of this bias which places it deep in the human language faculty and the human faculty for communication.

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This chapter reports on the construction of a new resource, the Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (PLAEME). Prose is underrepresented in the period 1250-1350, which is why this period is also underrepresented in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (PPCHE). This data gap is unfortunate, as we know that the period is important for morphosyntactic change. PLAEME addresses that data gap by transforming material from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) into the same format as the PPCHE. The chapter present a detailed account of its construction, as well as three case studies replicating three recent studies of Middle English syntax: the establishment of not as the expression of sentential negation (Ecay and Tamminga 2017), the fixing of the syntax of the dative alternation (Bacovcin 2017), and the introduction of argumental headed wh-relative clauses (Gisborne and Truswell 2017). These case studies show that PLAEME allows these changes to be charted in much greater detail, and hence demonstrates how PLAEME fills an important data gap.