Constant Rate Effects and Beyond: Modelling Interactions of Language-Internal and Language-External Factors in Language Change

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Language change is conditioned by a variety of factors, including grammar, the psychological facts of language learning, properties of speech production and perception, and the social embedding of linguistic communication. Although research in linguistics has produced a wealth of information about each of these factors separately, relatively little is known about their interactions. The reason for this is mainly methodological: studying the complex interactions of a number of factors requires adoption of a new kind of approach, in which languages and language communities are viewed as complex dynamical systems evolving through time in response to variation in a number of parameters.The aim of my research is to elucidate the interactions of internal and external factors in language change. Even though internal factors such as the psychology of language learning and various speech processing effects may shape the direction of language change, a crucial role is played by factors which are strictly speaking external to language: these include the social evaluation of different linguistic variants and the shape and evolution of the social network at the heart of the organization of a speech community, for example. I tackle the problem of these interactions by modelling language use and language learning mathematically and with computer simulations, and by comparing the predictions of these models against empirical data. The different predictions made by different models shed light on the biological, psychological and social processes underlying linguistic variation and language change; in this way, complex-systems modelling contributes to the ongoing debate on how and why languages change.