- 1:00 Welcome by Mike Hammond
- Introductory remarks by Andy Wedel
Friday, April 25, 2008: Harvill rm. 115
- 1:15 - 2:15 Harry Tily
- Diachronic processing preferences and their implications for models of syntactic change
- 2:15 – 3:15 Neal Snider
- An exemplar model of syntactic production
Tea Break
- 3:30 – 4:30 Joan Bresnan
- Predicting Syntax: Processing Dative Constructions in Two Varieties of English
- 4:30 – 5:30 Discussion
Dinner at Poca Cosa
- 8:30 Coffee
Saturday, April 26, 2008: Harvill rm. 102
- 8:45 – 9:45 Rob Malouf, Farrell Ackerman and Jim Blevins
- Inflectional morphology as a complex adaptive system
- 9:45 – 10:45 Melissa Redford
- Meaning and Mechanics in Speech and Language Acquisition
Tea Break
- 11:00 – 12:00 Eduardo Altmann
- Recurrences in processes with long-term memory
Lunch
- 1:30—2:30 Robert Daland
- Language variation: convergence, divergence and death
- 2:30 – 3:30 Colin Dawson
- 'Second-Order Learning' as a Source of Structure Stabilization in Both Individual Learning and Cultural Evolution
Tea Break
- 3:45 – 4:45 Andy Wedel
- Modeling sublexical contrast maintenance as an emergent effect of lexical category competition
- 4:45 – 5:45 Clay Beckner and Andy Wedel
- Modeling contributions of usage versus acquisition to language change
Department Potluck party at 7 at Adam Ussishkin and Andy Wedel’s house
Language variation: convergence, divergence and death
Robert Daland
Many population-level models of language dynamics exhibit linguistic convergence: any connected population containing multiple variants will eventually converge to a single variant (de Boer, 2000; Cucker, Zhou, & Smale, 2004; Niyogi, 2006; Abrams & Strogatz, 2007). While addressing the theoretical challenge of linguistic convergence, these models do not explain the persistence of systematic variation between groups that are demonstrably in contact, such as speakers of British and American English. I develop a mathematical framework for addressing this challenge by representing a language community as a dynamical system and explicitly quantifying the timescale of convergence. First, I give broad conditions under which convergence should occur, and provide simulation results offering quantitative support for the sociolinguistic intuition that language change is qualitatively different in small, egalitarian societies than in large, hierarchical ones. Then, the model is elaborated to provide a unique analysis of dialect-splitting in terms of the interaction between social and cognitive structure.