Putting old tools to novel uses: The role of form accessibility in semantic extension

Algorithms in the historical emergence of word senses

“…Our findings suggest that new senses will often be expressed by existing words with closely related senses, but this constraint might interact with other factors that shape lexical evolution. For instance, more-frequent word forms might be preferred over rarer ones for labeling new senses, since the former word forms may be more accessible (22). Further, speakers' knowledge of existing, generative patterns of polysemy (23)(24)(25), and their pragmatic reasoning about what senses are most likely to be understood in the current context (26), will also help explain how words accrue new senses over time, as will understanding the relative cognitive costs of generating novel words vs. reusing existing ones.…”

What happens to large changes? Saltation produces well-liked outputs that are hard to generate

“…These results suggest that listeners' beliefs about speakers' productions, if made apparent to and heeded by the speaker, can influence the speakers' future productions. On the other hand, listeners' beliefs about what is and is not acceptable are also based on the productions they experience, so that it is often the case that, in language change, "use leads, and belief follows" (Harmon & Kapatsinski, 2017). The sociolinguistic literature is full of dissociations between judgment and production, so that speakers who routinely produce an innovative form nonetheless judge it to be unacceptable due to social stigma associated with it (Labov, 1996).…”

“…In addition to careful observational studies of the impact of social acceptability on use, experimental work should investigate how judgment and production interact by examining more interactive tasks (e.g., Buz et al, 2016) and/or varying the order of production and judgment tasks (Harmon & Kapatsinski, 2017), and research on language acquisition outside of the laboratory should examine the timecourse of development of judgment and production in the acquisition of alternations (e.g., Kerkhoff, 2007).…”

“…Changes involving overgeneralization of an alternation to an intermediate sound are, in contrast, quite rare (Bolognesi, 1998;White, 2017). Insofar as error can seed language change (see Andersen, 1973;Bybee, 2010;Bybee & Slobin, 1982;Harmon & Kapatsinski, 2017;Hudson Kam & Newport, 2009; for discussion), saltatory alternations may be more likely to disappear via underapplication rather than over-extension of the alternation. In this paper, we attempt to examine the possible fate of large saltatory alternations by testing whether learners tend to underapply or to over-extend them, or both.…”

“…Since the judge is presented with the palatalized output form, whatever difficulty they would face generating the form is alleviated (see also Harmon & Kapatsinski, 2017;Luce & Pisoni, 1998, for similar arguments regarding the difference between openset and closed-set tasks).…”