Structural priming and language change in experiments, historical corpora, and translation: Towards a psycholinguistically informed approach to historical corpus analysis

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An obvious obstacle for any psycholinguistic approach to historical language change is that it is impossible to conduct psycholinguistic experiments with speakers from previous centuries. In more general terms, the types of empirical data typically used in experimental psycholinguistics and historical linguistics differ considerably between the two disciplines. The aim of the present project is to overcome these methodological differences and to establish a link between experimental psycholinguistics and historical corpus analysis. Specifically, we will develop a methodological toolset which allows us to simulate psycholinguistic experiments in a corpus analysis. To achieve this, we focus on particular phenomena which have been used in psycholinguistic experiments to gain insight into mechanisms of language processing, but can also be observed in corpus data. In other words, while we cannot conduct psycholinguistic experiments on, for example, speakers of Middle English, it is potentially possible to simulate such experiments in a quantitative historical corpus analysis, which focuses on the same phenomena as experimental research.A promising phenomenon to be investigated in both psycholinguistic experiments and (historical) corpus analyses is structural priming , i.e. the tendency of speakers to repeat structures previously encountered. Both within-language and cross-linguistic structural priming have been investigated extensively in psycholinguistic experiments, and has provided valuable insights into a wide variety of issues of monolingual and bilingual language processing, production, and development. These studies led to the development of elaborate theoretical models (e.g. Hartsuiker et al., 2004; Jacob et al., 2016; van Gompel & Arai, 2017) which establish links between observable priming effects, structural representations, and mechanisms of syntactic processing. The present proposal investigates the role of structural priming in two phenomena which have been extensively studied in historical linguistics, (a) frequency changes of the dative alternation in Middle English and (b) language change caused by Language Contact Through Translation for texts translated from Old French to Middle English. Based on Gries‘ (2005) rationale for determining structural priming effects in quantitative corpus analyses and Maier, Pickering and Hartsuiker’s (2017) work on the role of structural priming in translation, we will simulate structural priming experiments which allow us to gain insight into the psycholinguistic processes and mechanisms underlying these instances of historical language change.