CNL Lunch

Lisa Pearl

Modeling OV Loss in Old English: A Tale of Trigger-based Acquisition

Thursday April 10th, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Between 1066 and 1122 A.D., the Object-Verb (OV) order of Old
English underwent linguistic evolution specifically, the replacement of OV order with Verb-Object (VO) order (Lightfoot 1991, Bean 1983, Canale 1978, among others). It has been suggested that a population of children that use trigger-based acquisition would be capable of just this sort of rapid change (Lightfoot 1999), in the event that the underlying change of a single parameter (Chomsky 1981) - in this case, an OV/VO order parameter - is responsible for the changes in the surface contexts, as suggested in previous work by Kroch (1989). However, the sparseness of triggers in the primary linguistic data (PLD) of a child is a potential downfall to this
theory. I propose a probabilistic mathematical model in the spirit of
Yang (2000) that views the loss of OV order as a change in the
distribution of VO parameter settings within the Old English population and, through simulation, demonstrate that OV-loss can proceed as historically observed. Thus, I provide empirical data that a population using trigger-based acquisition is capable of the rapid change from OV to VO order and that trigger-sparseness in the PLD is not a barrier for a trigger-based acquisition theory. Moreover, in an extension, I examine the feasibility of degree-0
learnability, an idea advanced in Lightfoot 1991 which suggests that children may pay special attention to the unembedded clauses in the PLD during acquisition. Using the perspective of trigger-based acquisition, the loss of OV order in Old English would be considerably facilitated by degree-0 learnability since the OV-triggers in the unembedded clauses are quite degraded while the VO-triggers are not nearly so affected. The embedded clauses, however, suffer no such OV-trigger-degradation and would provide a solid point of resistance to OV-loss - *if* there were enough of them in the PLD. The goal of this extension is to determine the threshold percentage of the primary linguistic data that must consist of embedded clauses (and their accompanying triggers) before an Old English population's OV-loss is not rapid enough. This can then be compared against current estimates of embedded clauses in a child's PLD to determine whether degree-0 learnability is necessary or not.

References:
1) Bean, M. (1983). The Development of Word Order Patterns in Old English. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books.
2) Canale, M. (1978). Word Order Change in Old English: Base Reanalysis in Generative Grammar. Doctoral dissertation, McGill University.
3) Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
4) Kroch, A. (1989). Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change. vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 199-244.
5) Lightfoot, D. (1991). How to set parameters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
6) Lightfoot, D. (1999). The Development of Language: Acquisition, Change, and Evolution. Oxford: Blackwell.
7) Yang, C. (2000). Internal and external forces in language change.
Language Variation and Change. vol.12. pp. 231-250.