Kroch, A. and A. Taylor (1997). Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect variation and lan10 guage contact. In van Kemenade, A. and N. Vincent (eds.) Parameters of morphosyntactic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Home/Search   Document Details and Download   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....that is, for every grammar T i , c T i 0. The Theorem shows that instead of converging to a single grammar, the weights of a number of grammars reach a stable equilibrium and therefore co exist. This is precisely the case argued by Kroch (1990) and his colleagues (Pintzuk 1989, Santorini 1992, Kroch and Taylor 1997), that speakers during language change should be described by more than one grammars in co existence and competition. Extending the Theorem to successive generations of language learners, we can formalize Kroch et al. s intuition and derive theoretical results in language change, including the ....

Kroch, A. and A. Taylor (1997). Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect variation and lan10 guage contact. In van Kemenade, A. and N. Vincent (eds.) Parameters of morphosyntactic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

....time, strictly verb medial. On the other hand, in the North the loss of V2 seems to be more advanced than in the Midlands; but in the northern dialect our best evidence says that V2 word order was equally characteristic of sentences with pronoun subjects as of those with full noun phrase subjects (Kroch and Taylor 1997; Kroch, Taylor and Ringe 1997) In other words, the evidence for V2 was actually stronger in the dialect which lost the property first than in the dialects where the loss occurred somewhat later. As we will see below, however, there might actually be a learningbased explanation for this ....

....is, as so often, not conclusive; but it is suggestive and illustrates a line of research likely to grow in importance as the availability of annotated electronic corpora makes statistical studies more practical. We summarize here the analysis presented in Kroch, Taylor and Ringe (1997) and in Kroch and Taylor (1997), whose statistics were drawn from the Penn Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (Kroch and Taylor 1994) K T and KTR give evidence that with respect to the grammar of V2, there were two dialects in Middle English, a northern dialect in which the tensed verb moved to COMP and a southern one in ....

Kroch, Anthony and Ann Taylor. 1997. Verb movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect variation and language contact. In Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent (eds.), Parameters of morphosyntactic change, 297--325. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

.... is that language acquisition is the primary engine of language change (e.g. Lightfoot, 1979) In recent generative work on diachronic syntax, language change is primarily located in parameter resetting (reanalysis) during language acquisition (e.g. Lightfoot, 1992, 1999; Clark and Roberts, 1993; Kroch and Taylor, 1997). Differential learnability of grammatical systems, on the basis of learners exposure to triggering data from varying grammatical sources, causes language change. To a first approximation once the critical period for language acquisition is complete, the grammars internalized by learners do not ....

Kroch, Anthony and Ann Taylor (1997) `Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect variation and language contact' in van Kemenade, A. and Nigel Vincent (ed.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 297--325.

....Bayesian approach to parameter setting entails that learners will track the frequency of competing variants in terms of the posterior probabilities of the parameters associated with the variation. This accords better with the empirical behaviour of learners in such situations (e.g. Kroch, 1989; Kroch and Taylor, 1997; Lightfoot, 1997) They appear to acquire both variants and choose which to produce on broadly sociolinguistic grounds in some cases, and to converge preferentially on one variant in others. This behaviour could be modelled, to a first approximation in the current framework, by assigning varying ....

Kroch, A. and Taylor, A. (1997) `Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect variation and language contact' in van Kemenade, A. and N. Vincent (ed.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, Cambridge University Press, pp. 297--325.

....embodied in the Bayesian account means that learners will tend to track the frequency of competing variants in terms of the posterior probabilities of the parameters associated with the variation. This accords better with the empirical behaviour of learners in such situations (e.g. Kroch, 1989; Kroch and Taylor, 1997; Lightfoot, 1997) They appear to acquire both variants and choose which to produce on broadly sociolinguistic grounds in some cases, and to converge preferentially on one variant in others. This behaviour could be modelled straightforwardly in the current framework by postulating that parameters ....

Kroch, A. and Taylor, A. (1997) `Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect variation and language contact' in van Kemenade, A. and N. Vincent (ed.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, Cambridge University Press, pp. 297-- 325.

....development of language via linguistic selection. 1. 2 Linguistic Selection In recent generative linguistic work on diachronic syntax, language change is primarily located in parameter resetting (reanalysis) during language acquisition (e.g. Lightfoot, 1992, 1997; Clark and Roberts, 1993; Kroch and Taylor, 1997). Differential learnability of grammatical variants, on the basis of learners exposure to triggering data from varying grammatical sources, causes change. Language can be viewed as a dynamic system which adapts to its niche of human language learners and users (e.g. Cziko, 1995; Hurford, 1987; ....

....The Bayesian approach to parameter setting predicts that learners will track the frequency of competing variants in terms of the posterior probabilities of the parameters associated with the variation. This accords with the empirical behaviour of learners in such situations (e.g. Kroch, 1989; Kroch and Taylor, 1997; Lightfoot, 1997) They appear to acquire both variants and choose which to produce on broadly sociolinguistic grounds in some cases, and to converge preferentially to one variant in others. This behaviour could be modelled, to a first approximation in the current framework, by assigning varying ....

Kroch, A. and Taylor, A. (1997) `Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect variation and language contact' in van Kemenade, A. and N. Vincent (ed.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, Cambridge University Press, pp. 297-- 325.

.... for typological, statistical and implicational universals (e.g. Kirby, 1996, 1997, 1998) In generative work on diachronic syntax, language change is primarily located in parameter resetting (reanalysis) during language acquisition (e.g. Lightfoot, 1979, 1992, 1997; Clark and Roberts, 1993; Kroch and Taylor, 1997). Differential learnability of grammatical systems, on the basis of learners exposure to triggering data from varying grammatical sources, causes change. This can be modelled as an evolutionary process in which variant source grammars provide competing constructions which are ....

....probably a consequence of variation introduced through contact between language communities (e.g. Milroy, 1992) and the consequent linguistically heterogeneous data supplied to the learner. This is true even for those researchers who argue that language acquisition is the engine of change (e.g. Kroch and Taylor, 1997). 4.3 Emergence of Structured Language and its Learners To explore the emergence and persistence of structured language (and consequently the emergence of effective learners) in the simulation model (pseudo) random initialization was used. A series of simulation runs of 500 cycles (approximately ....

Kroch, A. and Taylor, A. (1997) `Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect variation and language contact' in van Kemenade, A. and N. Vincent (ed.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, Cambridge University Press, pp. 297-- 325.

....Bayesian approach to parameter setting entails that learners will track the frequency of competing variants in terms of the posterior probabilities of the parameters associated with the variation. This accords better with the empirical behaviour of learners in such situations (e.g. Kroch, 1989; Kroch and Taylor, 1997; Lightfoot, 1997) They appear to acquire both variants and choose which to produce on broadly sociolinguistic grounds in some cases, and to converge preferentially on one variant in others. This behaviour could be modelled, to a first approximation in the current framework, by assigning varying ....

Kroch, A. and Taylor, A. (1997) `Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect variation and language contact' in van Kemenade, A. and N. Vincent (ed.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, Cambridge University Press, pp. 297-- 325.

....in future work, but the results we report here do not bear on the question. We assume that the tensed verb, in both matrix declarative and tensed subordinate clauses, is located in INFL rather than in COMP. Here we follow Pintzuk s (1991, 1993) analysis of Old English and our own previous work (Kroch and Taylor 1997). The crucial point for current purposes is that in early Middle English INFL medial clauses, scrambled pronouns commonly appear between the XP in first position and the tensed verb, as they do in Old English. Most often, of course, this initial XP is the subject of the clause, especially in ....

.... evidence for decoupling the rate of pronoun scrambling from the rate of underlying OV word order can be found in the word order patterns of the Ayenbite of Inwit, a Kentish text from the 14th century that we have discussed elsewhere in connection with the verb second constraint in Middle English (Kroch and Taylor 1997; Kroch et al. 2000) With regard to the verb second constraint, this text is very conservative. At a time when the constraint is being lost everywhere else in England, it is largely intact and in the Old English form in the Ayenbite. 29 With regard to object position, the text distinguishes ....

Kroch, Anthony and Ann Taylor. 1997. Verb movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect variation and language contact. In Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent (eds.), Parameters of morphosyntactic change, 297--325. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

....of do support in imperatives In Middle English, the imperative verb precedes the subject, as in (5) 5) a. Naske ye of cunseil. b. Helpe thou me. not ask you of counsel help you me (Ancrene Riwle 58.569) The Earliest Prose Psalter 150.2290) As in van Kemenade (1987) Pintzuk (1991) and Kroch and Taylor (1997), we assume that weak pronouns in Middle English occur at the CP IP boundary. Thus, the fact that the imperative verb precedes the pronominal subject implies that the verb is located in C 0 . In early Modern English, imperatives show the same word order as in Middle English. But imperatives with ....

Kroch, Anthony, and Ann Taylor. 1997. Verb movement in Old and Middle English: dialect variation and language contact. In Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, ed. Ans van Kemenade, and Nigel Vincent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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