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Bayesian phylogenetic methods have been gaining traction and currency in historical linguistics, as their potential for uncovering elements of language change is increasingly understood. Here, we demonstrate a proof of concept for using ancestral state reconstruction methods to reconstruct changes in morphology. We use a simple Brownian motion model of character evolution to test how splits in ergative marking evolve across Pama-Nyungan, a large family of Australian languages. We are able to recover linguistically plausible paths of change, as well as rejecting implausible paths. The results of these analyses elucidate constraints on changes that have led to extensive synchronic variation in an interlocking morphological system. They further provide evidence of an ergative–accusative split traceable to Proto-Pama-Nyungan.

It has often been suggested that there is an inverse correlation between the number of adult non-native speakers in a language and its morphological complexity. Secluded languages often show more complex morphology, while high-contact languages go through more severe simplifications throughout the ages. One such simplification linked to language contact is the regularization of the Germanic past tense. Yet, a Wug task on the English past tense system by Cuskley et al. (2015) showed that non-native speakers tend to use the irregular past tense even more than native speakers. In this article, we replicate the Wug experiment for Dutch. Our results show similar evidence for a higher rate of irregularization across non-native speakers. Furthermore, we do not find any other simplification strategies among non-native speakers. Though caution is warranted, these converging results may suggest that non-native speakers are not the drivers of morphological simplification.

The spine of language change In his contribution to the 2005 anniversary issue of the journal Nederlandse Taalkunde, Fred Weerman remarked on the famous S-curve underlying language change, and claimed that a good explanation for this pattern is still lacking. We pick up the thread and assess what 15 years of research have clarified about the nature of the curve. We look at two aspects: the onset of the curve (also known as the ‘actuation problem’), and the sigmoid trajectory (known as ‘propagation’). For the actuation problem, we highlight the role of external variables, notably the role of cities in what kind of changes are more likely to occur. Higher urbanization leads to morphological simplification. For the propagation, we investigate the underlying mathematics of the curve, and its conceptual motivation. We argue that the lesser-known probit function is conceptually more insightful than the commonly used logit function, and marginally outperforms the latter as well, when tested on real data. The difference is so small, however, that in actual practice, the logit function, which is mathematically simpler, may continue to be preferred

Germanic preterite morphology has been the subject of a bewildering number of studies, looking especially at the competition between the so-called strong inflection (operating with ablaut), and the so-called weak inflection (operating with suffixation). In this study over 250,000 observations from twelve centuries of Dutch were analyzed in a generalized linear mixed-effect model gauging the effects of a multitude of language-internal factors, ranging from various frequency measures to various form-related factors and how they interact with each other. This study confirms the well-known effects of token and type frequency, finding that formal similarities can be both a driving and conservative force in language change and demonstrates that not all members (i.e., preterites and past participles) of a verb paradigm change at the same time, which is both an effect of their frequency and their formal coherence within the paradigm.

In the Germanic languages, two types of inflection exist. Some verbs take the strong inflection, where ablaut is used to form past tense and past participle (e.g. drive-drove-driven). Other verbs take the weak inflection, where a dental suffix is used (e.g. play-played-played). There are also verbs that vary in their preterite and past participle form (e.g. dive-dived or dive-dove). In a diachronic corpus study, De Smet & Van de Velde (2020) show that in Dutch this variation can be exapted to express aspect in an iconic manner. Their results indicate that the longer weak preterites (e.g. schuilde ‘hid’) are used more often in durative contexts, while the shorter strong variants (e.g. school ‘hid’) are used more often in punctual contexts. For the past participles, this image is reversed: the longer strong variants (e.g. gescholen ‘hidden’) are used more often in durative contexts, while the shorter weak variants (e.g. geschuild ‘hidden’) are used more often in punctual contexts. In this paper, we seek experimental validation for these results. Participants (N=664) were presented with a forced choice task where they had to choose between weak or strong preterites and past participles of nonce verbs in sentences suggesting either a durative or a punctual context. We worked with three different between-subject conditions, namely preterite singular, preterite plural and past participle. Each survey consisted of 20 target items and 10 filler items. The target items were 20 nonce verbs of the five most productive ablaut subclasses in Dutch (cf. Knooihuizen & Strik 2014). Every verb only appeared once in each survey to prevent priming effects. Half of the target items were presented in a durative context (which was suggested through the use of adverbials), the other half in a punctual context. Hence aspect was manipulated within subject. Results were analysed using a generalized linear mixed effects model with random effects for subject and item and random slopes for aspect by subject and by item. Though no overall effect of aspect on verb inflection was found, results indicate an iconic trend for verbs of one specific ablaut subclass that supports the corpus results from De Smet & Van de Velde (2020). Because this ablaut class shows the most variation in real language use (of the five subclasses selected for the experiment), it could be that language users need to be familiar with a certain amount of variation for a specific class in order to become routinized in exapting the variation to express aspect. Furthermore, the durative-punctual distinction was also found to be portrayed in yet another iconic manner: verb forms with vowels that are sound symbolically associated with long slow movements were used more often in durative contexts, while verb forms with vowels that are associated with quick, short movements were used more often in punctual contexts. References – De Smet, Isabeau & Freek Van de Velde. 2020. Semantic differences between strong and weak verb forms in Dutch. Cognitive Linguistics 31(3). 393-416. Knooihuizen, Remco & Oscar Strik. 2014. Relative productivity potentials of Dutch verbal inflection patterns. Folia Linguistica Historica 35. 173-200.

This article takes a quantitative approach to the long-term dynamics of the preterite inflection in West Germanic, with a special focus on Dutch. In a first step, we replicate two often-cited studies on English and German (Lieberman et al. 2007 and Carroll et al. 2012, respectively) by looking at Dutch. This part also tackles some methodological shortcomings in the previous studies. In a second step, we delve deeper into the evolution of the preterite morphology in Dutch in the last 1200 years, by looking at several factors which have been previously only investigated in isolation or on limited time slices. Using multiple binomial regression analysis, the various factors are studied under multifactorial control.

In every-day language use, two or more structurally unrelated constructions may occasionally give rise to strings that look very similar on the surface. As a result of this superficial resemblance, a subset of instances of one of these constructions may deviate in the probabilistic preference for either of several possible formal variants. This effect is called ‘constructional contamination’, and was introduced inPijpops & Van de Velde (2016). Constructional contamination bears testimony to the hypothesis that language users do not always execute a full parse of the utterances they interpret, but instead often rely on ‘shallow parsing’ and the storage of large, unanalyzed chunks of language in memory, as proposed inFerreira, Bailey, & Ferraro (2002),Ferreira & Patson (2007), andDąbrowska (2014).Pijpops & Van de Velde (2016)investigated a single case study in depth, namely the Dutch partitive genitive. This case study is reviewed, and three new case studies are added, namely the competition between long and bare infinitives, word order variation in verbal clusters, and preterite formation. We find evidence of constructional contamination in all case studies, albeit in varying degrees. This indicates that constructional contamination is not a particularity of the Dutch partitive genitive but appears to be more wide-spread, affecting both morphology and syntax. Furthermore, we distinguish between two forms of constructional contamination, viz. first degree and second degree contamination, with first degree contamination producing greater effects than second degree contamination.

Dutch, like other Germanic languages, disposes of two strategies to express past tense: the strong inflection (e.g., rijden – reed ‘drive – drove’) and the weak inflection (spelen – speelde ‘play – played’). This distinction is for the most part lexically determined in that each verb occurs in one of the two inflections. Diachronically the system is in flux though, with the resilience of some verbs being mainly driven by frequency. Synchronically this might result in variable verbs (e.g., schuilen – schuilde/school ‘hide – hid’ or raden – raadde/ried ‘guess – guessed’). This diachronic (1300–2000) corpus study shows that this variation is not haphazard, but that semantic factors are at play. We see two such effects. First of all, synchronically, the variation is exapted in an iconic manner to express aspect: durative meanings tend to be expressed by longer verb forms and punctual meanings tend to be expressed by shorter verb forms. Secondly, we see that metaphorical meanings come to be associated within obsolescent inflectional forms, as predicted by Kuryłowicz’s “fourth law of analogy”.

In the Germanic languages, two types of inflection exist. Verbs can either take the strong inflection to form the preterite and past participle (using ablaut, e.g. write-wrote-written) or the weak inflection (using a dental suffix, e.g. stay-stayed-stayed). However, there are also verbs that can take both the strong and the weak inflection (e.g. dive-dived or dive-dove). In a diachronic corpus study, De Smet & Van de Velde (2020) show that in Dutch this variation can be exapted to express aspect in an iconic manner. Their results indicate that the longer weak preterites (e.g. schuilde ‘hid’) are used more often in durative contexts, while the shorter strong variants (e.g. school ‘hid’) are used more often in punctual contexts. For the past participles, this image is reversed: the longer strong variants (e.g. gescholen ‘hidden’) are used more often in durative contexts, while the shorter weak variants (e.g. geschuild ‘hidden’) are used more often in punctual contexts. In this paper, we seek experimental validation for these results. Participants (N=664) were presented with a forced choice task where they had to choose between weak or strong preterites and past participles of nonce verbs in sentences suggesting either a durative or a punctual context. We worked with three different between-subject conditions, namely preterite singular, preterite plural and past participle. Each survey consisted of 20 target items and 10 filler items. The target items were 20 nonce verbs of the five most productive ablaut subclasses in Dutch (cf. Knooihuizen & Strik 2014). Every verb only appeared once in each survey to prevent priming effects. Half of the target items were presented in a punctual context (which was suggested through the use of adverbials), the other half in a durative context. Hence aspect was manipulated within subject. Results were analysed using a generalized linear mixed effects model with random effects for subject and item and random slopes for aspect by subject and by item. Though no overall effect of aspect on verb inflection was found, results indicate an iconic trend for verbs of one specific ablaut subclass that supports the corpus results from De Smet & Van de Velde (2020). Because this ablaut class shows the most variation in real language use (of the five subclasses selected for the experiment), it could be that language users need to be familiar with a certain amount of variation for a specific class in order to become routinized in exapting the variation to express aspect. Furthermore, the durative-punctual distinction was also found to be portrayed in yet another iconic manner: verb forms with vowels that are sound symbolically associated with long slow movements were used more often in durative contexts, while verb forms with vowels that are associated with quick, short movements were used more often in punctual contexts. De Smet, Isabeau & Freek Van de Velde. 2020. Semantic differences between strong and weak verb forms in Dutch. Cognitive Linguistics 31(3). 393-416. Knooihuizen, Remco & Oscar Strik. 2014. Relative productivity potentials of Dutch verbal inflection patterns. Folia Linguistica Historica 35. 173-200.

It has often been suggested that the morphological complexity of a language is inversely correlated with its number of adult non-native speakers (Lupyan & Dale 2008; Trudgill 2010; Dale & Lupyan 2012; Bentz & Winter 2013). This has been proposed as the reason why more secluded languages like Icelandic or Faroese use more complex case systems, while a high-contact language like English has gone through drastic simplifications throughout time (Trudgill 2002). One such simplification linked to language contact has been the regularization of the irregular past tense. De Smet & Van de Velde (2019) show in a comparison of the regularization rate of English, Dutch and German that English portrays by far the highest rate of regularization, while German, a language less affected by contact, displays the lowest rate of regularization, and Dutch takes an in-between position, both in the degree of regularization and in the degree of language contact. Carroll et al. (2012) observe that peaks in the regularization of the German irregular verb throughout the centuries co-occur with peaks in language contact in German. Finally, Dale & Lupyan (2012) show that speakers of American English (which has been subject to a higher degree of language contact) have a higher preference for regular past tense forms than speakers of British English. However, in a Wug experiment by Cuskley et al. (2015) a conflicting trend is found for English: non-native speakers tend to use a higher rate of irregular past tense forms than native speakers. The questions rises whether similar results can be uncovered for the other Germanic languages. In this paper, we replicate the study by Cuskley and colleagues (2015) for a second Germanic language, i.e. Dutch. Both native (N = 442) and non-native speakers (N = 108) of Dutch were asked to give the past tense form of a series of nonce verbs. Our results confirm the findings by Cuskley et al. (2015): for Dutch as well, a higher preference for irregular past tense forms is found among non-native speakers. This effect tends to increase as speaker’s proficiency of Dutch decreases and seems to be most outspoken for the most salient strong patterns in Dutch, such as /ɛɪ-e/ (e.g. blijf-bleef ‘stay-stayed’). Furthermore, no other types of simplification, besides regularization, were found in the past tense strategies of non-native speakers. Though it is not yet clear to what extent our results from this Wug task are the reflection of real-life language use of non-native speakers and caution is thus very much needed, the possibility needs to be considered that non-native speakers are not the drivers of change in Germanic verb morphology, as has previously often been assumed. Therefore, we need to explore other options, for example, that simplification in cases of language contact could be the result of native speakers trying to accommodate their own language to the influx of immigrants. Bentz, Christian & Bodo Winter. 2013. Languages with more second language learners tend to lose nominal case. Language Dynamics and Change 3. 1-27. Carroll, Ryan & Ragnar Svare & Joseph Salmons. 2012. Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of German verbs. Journal of Historical Linguistics 2. 153-172. Cuskley, Christine, Francesca Colaiori, Claudio Castellano, Vittorio Loreto, Martina Pugliese & Francesca Tria. 2015. The adoption of linguistic rules in native and non-native speakers: Evidence from a Wug task. Journal of Memory and Language 84. 205-223. Dale, Rick & Gary Lupyan. 2012. Understanding the origins of morphological diversity: The linguistic niche hypothesis. Advances in Complex Systems 15. 1-16. De Smet, Isabeau & Freek Van de Velde. 2019. Reassessing the evolution of West-Germanic preterite inflection. Diachronica 36(2). 139-179. Lupyan, Gary & Dale, Rick. 2010. Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PloS ONE 5. 1-10. Trudgill, Peter. 2002. Linguistic and Social Typology. In Jack K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The handbook of language variation and change, 707-728. Oxford: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter. 2010. Investigations in sociohistorical linguistics: Stories of colonisation and contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.