This week’s talk will be given by Kevin Stadler, who is in the 1st year of his PhD with us. “Everything you always wanted to know about modelling language change”, Tuesday 7th May, 11am, DSB 1.17. Abstract below.

“Everything you always wanted to know about modelling language change”

In this talk I will give an overview of what I’ve been up to in the first 8 months of my PhD. I will discuss the “problem” of language change, and how it’s different from the emergence of conventions/communication systems more generally. I will briefly talk about the kinds of accounts that have been put forward to explain language change, both functional and social, and then provide an overview and critique of formal models of language change. I will then show some preliminary results from a new model of momentum-based selection inspired by cultural change in other (non-linguistic) domains that spontaneously produces the s-shaped transitions observed in language change. Using this result as a starting point I will discuss some interesting hypotheses that the model relies on and predictions that it makes, all of which are up to empirical testing.

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