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Evolutionary Perspectives on Diachronic Syntax 1.1 a Language Agent

The purpose of this article is to argue the merits of`population thinking' in gaining insight into linguistic and, in particular, syntactic change. Population-level thinking and modelling can shed new light on many issues in the study of language acquisition and language change, and leads directly to a more precise characterisation of (E-)language than that provided by recent generative linguistics. Nevertheless, this way of thinking is fully compatible with the major insights of the latter, and integrates them into a framework in which language variation and change are inherent and inevitable, rather than peripheral and/or accidental, properties of language. I will argue that (E-)languages are best modelled as particular kinds of dynamical systems; namely, complex adaptive systems (where these terms are used in technical senses made precise below). The article is intended to be an accessible introduction to some relevant ideas and techniques from modern evolutionary theory and from the mathematical and computational study of dynamical systems, as well as their potential application in diachronic syntax. I deal mostly with simple linguistic scenarios based on constituent order changes to illustrate these ideas and techniques clearly. I abstract away from the sociolinguistic detail of the actuation and diiusion of changes, and also from much of the linguistic detail of attested changes. However, the article also contains extensive references both to further background material and to more speciic and detailed work within the general framework exempliied here. 1 1 The Basic Model A formal model achieves greatest generality, and thus validity, by making as few assumptions as necessary and by omitting as much extraneous detail as possible. It is a matter of judgement, of course, deciding what is extraneous and what essential. Chomsky (1965) deened grammatical competence in terms of the language of (i.e. stringset generated by) an ideal speaker-hearer at a single instant in time, abstracting away from working memory limitations, errors of performance, and so forth. The generative research programme has been very successful, but, one legacy of the idealisation to a single speaker at a single instant has been the sidelining of variation and change. My model will embody similar judgements: language users will, in essence, be Chomskyan ideal speaker-hearers (and learners), their linguistic interactions will be very simpliied, and so forth. An assumption I will make here, in common with most work in diachronic generative syntax, is that language acquisition is the fundamental factor in signiicant syntactic change, and …