Entrenchment and persistence in language change: the Spanish past subjunctive

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate that, like frequency, morphosyntactic persistence can have a conserving effect on language change. To substantiate this claim, we analyze the alternation between the Spanish past subjunctive forms ending in –ra and –se (as in comiera and comiese ‘had eaten’). Due to the ongoing replacement of –se by –ra, persistence and frequency are the best predictors of the alternation in our data. First, the persistence effect of a prior –se is significantly greater than the persistence effect of a prior –ra. Second, although –se is basically restricted to third person singular morphology in contexts without persistence, when primed by –se this restriction is drastically reduced. Our results also shed light on the relationship between frequency and persistence in language change. Although both result in conservation, the conserving effect of frequency causes irregularity such as the paradigmatic atrophy of Spanish –se forms. In contrast, persistence can temporarily re-establish paradigmatic regularity and consequently strengthen the cognitive representation of obsolescing constructions. However, this resuscitating effect of persistence appears to be restricted to low-frequency –se forms; because they are generally more entrenched, the activation of high-frequency –se forms relies less on persistence effects.

The range of linguistic units: Distance effects in English mandative subjunctive constructions

“…It has been repeatedly demonstrated that less frequent constructions engender stronger persistence effects than more frequent constructions do (e.g. Bock 1986, Ferreira 2003, Rosemeyer & Schwenter 2017. We submit that persistence and mood choice represent two disparate phenomena exhibiting disparate characteristic features.…”

“…Note further that the two phenomena have different time windows. For example, Rosemeyer & Schwenter (2017) observed persistence effects over stretches of as many as 100 words. This is much more than the (average or maximum) distance between trigger and target in our data.…”

Subject pronoun expression and language mode in bilingual Spanish

“…Lexical subjects, on the contrary, are rather infrequent in the context of the task. Schwenter and colleagues have argued that forms that are less frequent show a stronger perseveration effect (Rosemeyer and Schwenter 2017;Schwenter and Cacoullos 2008;inter alia). Thus, it is possible that the oddity of the use of lexical subjects in the context of a story with only one human referent may have made lexical subjects, in addition to being infrequent, more salient, and, thus, a better target for perseveration.…”

Experimenting on the past: a case study on changing analysability in Englishly-adverbs

“…Torres Cacoullos's study offers a promising method to test whether underlying structures can become gradually less analysable over time. Crucially, it also shows that priming effects can be studied and exploited to make a theoretical point even in historical written data (see also Rosemeyer & Schwenter 2017).…”