Nikolaus Ritt

Neutral stability, drift, and the diversification of languages

The diversification of languages is one of the most interesting facts about language that seek explanation from an evolutionary point of view. Conceptually the question is related to explaining mechanisms of speciation. An argument that prominently figures in evolutionary accounts of language diversification is that it serves the formation of group markers which help to enhance in-group cooperation. In this paper we use the theory of evolutionary games to show that language diversification on the level of the meaning of lexical items can come about in a perfectly cooperative world solely as a result of the effects of frequency-dependent selection. Importantly, our argument does not rely on some stipulated function of language diversification in some co-evolutionary process, but comes about as an endogenous feature of the model. The model that we propose is an evolutionary language game in the style of Nowak et al. (1999) [The evolutionary language game. J. Theor. Biol. 200, 147-162], which has been used to explain the rise of a signaling system or protolanguage from a prelinguistic environment. Our analysis focuses on the existence of neutrally stable polymorphisms in this model, where, on the level of the population, a signal can be used for more than one concept or a concept can be inferred by more than one signal. Specifically, such states cannot be invaded by a mutation for bidirectionality, that is, a mutation that tries to resolve the existing ambiguity by linking each concept to exactly one signal in a bijective way. However, such states are not resistant against drift between the selectively neutral variants that are present in such a state. Neutral drift can be a pathway for a mutation for bidirectionality that was blocked before but that finally will take over the population. Different directions of neutral drift open the door for a mutation for bidirectionality to appear on different resident types. This mechanism-which can be seen as a form of shifting balance-can explain why a word can acquire a different meaning in two languages that go back to the same common ancestral language, thereby contributing to the splitting of these two languages. Examples from currently spoken languages, for instance, English clean and its German cognate klein with the meaning of small, are provided.

Words: Structure, Meaning, Function: A Festschrift for Dieter Kastovsky

The thematic connections between the articles assembled in this volume mirror the central and integrating role of the word in almost all matters linguistic. With formal and descriptive aspects of the word (in inflection and derivation) at the centre, the contributions branch out into phonology, syntax, pragmatics and, most importantly, semantics. In terms of languages the focus is mainly on English (synchronically and diachronically) but Hungarian, Polish and German are also considered among others. The theoretical focus lies on various aspects of language change on the one hand, and on morphological concepts such as productivity, or the morphological status of items on the other.

How rarities like gold came to exist: on co-evolutionary interactions between morphology and lexical phonotactics

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-Kolaczyk 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 morphotactic models is indeed likely to have played a role in establishing VVCC rhymes in the English lexicon, since VVCC rhymes of the types VV[sonorant]/d|z/ began to establish themselves in lexical phonotactics at the same period in which they also started to be produced in inflection, and clearly before similar types that had no inflectionally produced analogues (i.e. VV[sonorant]/t|s/ as in fault, dance). At the same time, we show that this does not necessarily contradict the hypothesis that homophonies between lexical and morphotactic rhymes are dispreferred. We argue that under the specific historical circumstances that obtained in English, natural ways of eliminating the resulting ambiguities failed to be available. Finally, we show that, once the phonotactically and semiotically dispreferred VV[sonorant]/d|z/ rhymes had been established, the emergence of morphotactically unambiguous rhymes of the types VV[sonorant]/t|s/ was to be expected, since they filled what was an accidental rather than natural gap in the phonotactic system of English (see Hayes & White 2013).

Of vowel shifts great, small, long and short

This paper argues that the development of Early Modern English short vowels can be accounted for in terms of a chain shift which essentially lowered and centralised them. The shift, which we propose to call Short Vowel Shift, is as coherent and systematic as the comparably well established Great Vowel Shift. At the same time it is argued that both shifts represent historiographic constructs, or stories, whose plausibility depends not only on their truth value but at least as much on their fruitfulness and on the consiliences they produce.

Word form shapes are culturally selected for indicating their morphological structure

Listeners recognize morphologically complex word forms by their phonotactic shapes. For example, the final consonant clusters /md/ in seemed, /ld/ in filled, or /ks/ in socks function as clues that prompt decomposition. At the same time, experimental work (Post, Marslen-Wilson & Tyler 2008, cf. also Marslen-Wilson & Tyler 1997 & 1998) has shown that such recognition strategies are over-applied to word forms that are not actually complex, but simply happen to be shaped like complex ones. Thus, listeners attempt to decompose not only actual past tense forms such as fill+ed or sign+ed, or actual plurals such as sock+s but also simple words such as build or find, or axe, which delays processing, and leads listeners up garden paths. Obviously, however, such problems arise only when morphologically produced sound sequences have homophones among morphologically simple items. As we have seen, this is true of final clusters such as /nd/, /ld/ or /ks/. It is not true of clusters such as final /md/, /vd/, or /gz/, however. The latter occur only in past forms such as seemed, or loved, or in plurals, genitives, or 3sg forms such as eggs, Meg’s or digs. Therefore, they signal complexity unambiguously and reliably. If speakers are sensitive to the problems resulting from ambiguities between morphologically produced clusters (as in fill+ed) and lexically simple ones (as in build), they should be biased against the use of words that are ambiguous in that respect (Dressler & Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2006; Dressler, Dziubalska-Kołaczyk & Pestal 2010). Since morphotactically ambiguous sequences are abundant in natural languages, however, the processing difficulties they produce do not seem to prevent successful communication and can only be slight. They nevertheless ought to be detectable in long-term language change, which results from vast numbers of communicative interactions and iterated learning events, known to 408

Linguistic and non-linguistic correlates in the evolution of phonotactic diversity

Linguistic dynamics have been hypothesized to be driven by ecological factors such as population size or social structure (see Nettle, 2012 for an excellent overview). Particularly, there is an ongoing debate as to whether population size can be seen as an explanatory factor in the evolution of phonemic richness (Atkinson, 2011; Bybee, 2011; Hay & Bauer, 2007; Wichmann, Rama, & Holman, 2011; see also Moran, McCloy, & Wright, 2012 for critical discussion). In this regard, the evolution of larger sublexical constituents, i.e. sequences of sounds below the word level, has gained much less attention (but see Maddieson, 2013 or Rama, 2013). Moreover, studies on the connection between ecological factors and linguistic properties were primarily comparative in nature, although the parallel evolution of social structure and language in individual linguistic strands may also provide useful insights into the mechanics that drive language evolution (see Bybee, 2011; Pagel, Atkinson, & Meade, 2007; Trudgill, 2004). In this paper, we conceptualize phonotactic items (sequences of sounds) as culturally transmitted pieces of linguistic knowledge, i.e. competence constituents in their own right, which spread through populations just like single sounds, words or constructions (Croft, 2000; Ritt, 2004). Phonotactic items should therefore be subject to similar evolutionary pressures and mechanisms. We investigate the diachronic development of diversity of the phonotactic inventory in the history of English from Middle English to Present Day English (using historical data from PPCME2, PPCEME, PPCMBE and COHA, and phonological transcriptions from ECCE and CMU). We focus on word final phonotactics because changes are most likely to occur at this prosodically weak position, and for methodological reasons (fully phonologically analyzed historical texts are not available for early periods). We find that the diversity of word-final coda phonotactics has been increasing through the past 800 years, and that the 15

The basic reproductive ratio as a link between acquisition and change in phonotactics

Language acquisition and change are thought to be causally connected. We demonstrate a method for quantifying the strength of this connection in terms of the basic reproductive ratio of linguistic constituents. It represents a standardized measure of reproductive success, which can be derived both from diachronic and from acquisition data. By analyzing phonotactic English data, we show that the results of both types of derivation correlate, so that phonotactic acquisition indeed predicts phonotactic change, and vice versa. After drawing that general conclusion, we discuss the role of utterance frequency and show that the latter exhibits destabilizing effects only on late acquired items, which belong to phonotactic periphery. We conclude that - at least in the evolution of English phonotactics - acquisition serves conservation, while innovation is more likely to occur in adult speech and affects items that are less entrenched but comparably frequent.

On the replicator dynamics of lexical stress: accounting for stress-pattern diversity in terms of evolutionary game theory

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 ˈ lentil – ho ˈ tel , ˈ envoy – de ˈ gree , ˈ research N – re ˈ search N and ˈ access V – ac ˈ cess V . 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.

Eliminating unpredictable variation through interaction

In this work we compare, on the well explored domain of Indo-European languages, the phylogenetic outputs of three different sets of linguistic characters: traditional etymological judgments, a system for phonetic alignment of lists of cognates, and a set of values for generative syntactic parameters. The correlation and relative informativeness of distances and phylogenies generated by the three types of characters can thus be for the first time accurately evaluated, and the degree of success of the last two, innovative, alternatives to the classical comparative method can be so assessed.Language shift is widely believed to accelerate change in the target language, an effect which is generally attributed to innovations introduced by new speakers during the second language acquisition (SLA) process (Thomason & Kaufman, 1988). If this hypothesis is correct, then the rate of contact-induced language change in a language shift context should be related to the rate at which second language (L2) speakers enter the population. Unfortunately, little diachronic data exists to test this hypothesis. The aim of the present paper is to model the mechanism that makes SLA accelerate language change on a population level and compare its predictions to a rare diachronic data set from the ongoing language shift in Maputo, Mozambique. To model linguistic interaction, we adapted Jansson et al.s model of creole formation (Jansson et al. 2015). At each time step, all speakers met in pairwise interactions and chose to utter one of n variants of a linguistic feature based on their probability distribution of usage. Each agent then modified their distribution of usage based on what they heard by using a linear updating rule with parameter l. After a round of interactions, population turnover occurred with some individuals dying and new L1 and L2 speakers entering the population with rates b and r, respectively. Newborn L1s chose two linguistic`parents at random and averaged their usage distributions to initialize their own. L2 individuals started with the population mean frequencies of usage. However, with probability μ, a newly recruited L2 speaker could assign all the probability