There is an exciting emerging research area in English Linguistics which concerns itself with current change, i.e. changes in the language that have taken place over relatively short spans of time, over decades rather than centuries, as is traditionally the case in diachronic linguistics. Changes across shorter periods of time have been studied in the past by a number of scholars, e.g. by Barbe...

This paper considers the problem of language change. Linguists must explain not only how languages are learned but also how and why they have evolved along certain trajectories and not others. While the language learning problem has focused on the behavior of individuals and how they acquire a particular grammar from a class of grammars G, here we consider a population of such learners and inve...

Since Greenberg the recognition of linguistic universals has been the backbone of language typology. Earlier Garvin had already divided universals into absolute and potential ones, the former uncontested cornerstones of linguistic theory, the latter commonly accepted generalizations among experienced professionals. The 'universals' to be discussed here are of the latter type: tried and tested p...

This paper formalizes linguists’ intuitions about language change, proposing a dynamical systems model for language change derived from a model for language acquisition. Linguists must explain not only how languages are learned but also how and why they have evolved along certain trajectories and not others. While the language learning problem has focused on the behavior of individuals and how ...

Lewis [L1] invented signaling games to show that semantic meaning conventions can arise simply from regularities in communicative behavior. The behavioral implementation of such conventions are so-called signaling systems. Previous research addressed the emergence of signaling systems by combining signaling games with learning dynamics, and not uncommonly researchers examined the circumstances ...

The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use particular linguistic variants associated with the social groups they identify with. The influence of other groups propagating across the speech community as new ...

Questions related to the evolution of language have recently known an impressive increase of interest (Briscoe, 2002). This short paper aims at questioning the scientific status of these models and their relations to attested data. We show that one cannot directly model non-linguistic factors (exogenous factors) even if they play a crucial role in language evolution. We then examine the relatio...

Steels in [4] claims that both flux of agents (changing of agents in an experiment) and stochasticity in communication of agents are necessary for a spontaneous change in language. This paper argues that flux of agents alone could be responsible for a spontaneous change in language. This hypothesis is demonstrated by modeling language use through language games played in a population of evolvin...

Language is always in flux. Over time new patterns can be observed that are either minor modifications to the linguistic system, as when the meaning of a lexical item changes, or major ones, as when word order changes occur. That language change occurs primarily as a result of acquisition is uncontroversial. There are, however, very different theories and discourses about how to interpret this ...