Linguistic Adaptation at Work? The Change of Word Order and Case System From Latin to the Romance Languages

Bentz, Christian; Christiansen, Morten H.

doi:10.1142/9789814295222_0004

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…• the most frequent word order by far is SVO (Bentz & Christiansen, 2010) if frequency is measured in number of speakers and not in number of languages as in Table 1.…”

Section: Table 1 Near Herementioning

confidence: 99%

The Placement of the Head that Minimizes Online Memory

Ferrer-i-Cancho

2015

Lang Dyn Change

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It is well known that the length of a syntactic dependency determines its online memory cost. Thus, the problem of the placement of a head and its dependents (complements or modifiers) that minimizes online memory is equivalent to the problem of the minimum linear arrangement of a star tree. However, how that length is translated into cognitive cost is not known. This study shows that the online memory cost is minimized when the head is placed at the center, regardless of the function that transforms length into cost, provided only that this function is strictly monotonically increasing. Online memory defines a quasi-convex adaptive landscape with a single central minimum if the number of elements is odd and two central minima if that number is even. We discuss various aspects of the dynamics of word order of subject (S), verb (V) and object (O) from a complex systems perspective and suggest that word orders tend to evolve by swapping adjacent constituents from an initial or early SOV configuration that is attracted towards a central word order by online memory minimization. We also suggest that the stability of SVO is due to at least two factors, the quasi-convex shape of the adaptive landscape in the online memory dimension and online memory adaptations that avoid regression to SOV. Although OVS is also optimal for placing the verb at the center, its low frequency is explained by its long distance to the seminal SOV in the permutation space.

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“…• the most frequent word order by far is SVO (Bentz & Christiansen, 2010) if frequency is measured in number of speakers and not in number of languages as in Table 1.…”

Section: Table 1 Near Herementioning

confidence: 99%

The Placement of the Head that Minimizes Online Memory

Ferrer-i-Cancho

2015

Lang Dyn Change

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“…For example, Herman (2000) argues that L2 speakers that have been "recruited" into the Latin speech community when the Roman Empire spread throughout Europe were one important factor contributing to case erosion (cf. Bentz and Christiansen, 2010;Clackson and Horrocks, 2007: 276). Swedish and Danish also underwent considerable case erosion, for which Norde (2001: 243) states that "internal factors alone are not a sufficient explanation for the disappearance of inflectional case."…”

Section: Convergence With Qualitative Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Languages with More Second Language Learners Tend to Lose Nominal Case

2013

Self Cite

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In this paper, we provide quantitative evidence showing that languages spoken by many second language speakers tend to have relatively small nominal case systems or no nominal case at all. In our sample, all languages with more than 50% second language speakers had no nominal case. The negative association between the number of second language speakers and nominal case complexity generalizes to different language areas and families. As there are many studies attesting to the difficulty of acquiring morphological case in second language acquisition, this result supports the idea that languages adapt to the cognitive constraints of their speakers, as well as to the sociolinguistic niches of their speaking communities. We discuss our results with respect to sociolinguistic typology and the Linguistic Niche Hypothesis, as well as with respect to qualitative data from historical linguistics. All in all, multiple lines of evidence converge on the idea that morphosyntactic complexity is reduced by a high degree of language contact involving adult learners.

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“…Second, what is the best way of measuring the abundance of a word order? It turns out that the most frequent word order, if frequency is measured in number of speakers and not in number of languages (Dryer, 2011), is SVO by far (Bentz & Christiansen, 2010).…”

Section: The Preference For Head Last In Simple Sequences and Its Losmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Might Sov Be Initially Preferred and Then Lost or Recovered? A Theoretical Framework

Ferrer-i-Cancho

2014

The Evolution of Language

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Little is known about why SOV order is initially preferred and then discarded or recovered. Here we present a framework for understanding these and many related word order phenomena: the diversity of dominant orders, the existence of free words orders, the need of alternative word orders and word order reversions and cycles in evolution. Under that framework, word order is regarded as a multiconstraint satisfaction problem in which at least two constraints are in conflict: online memory minimization and maximum predictability.

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Linguistic Adaptation at Work? The Change of Word Order and Case System From Latin to the Romance Languages

Cited by 8 publications

References 9 publications

The Placement of the Head that Minimizes Online Memory

The Placement of the Head that Minimizes Online Memory

Languages with More Second Language Learners Tend to Lose Nominal Case

Why Might Sov Be Initially Preferred and Then Lost or Recovered? A Theoretical Framework

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