Abstract
This paper presents some evidence that language change in heritage languages
(and beyond) systematically responds to general factors of language design when it
comes to fixed sequences of functional heads within given domains. Concretely, we
investigate patterns of change across various heritage languages, both in the wordinternal domain (person and number features) and at the sentence level (word order): we show that change in these different domains is consistently shaped by a
bias towards monotonicity and uniformity in computation, such that points of nonuniformity in the relevant sequence can be predicted to be the gateway to change.
Crucially, this change systematically brings about a reduction in complexity; as
such, these factors are proposed as a new metric for linguistic complexity
(and beyond) systematically responds to general factors of language design when it
comes to fixed sequences of functional heads within given domains. Concretely, we
investigate patterns of change across various heritage languages, both in the wordinternal domain (person and number features) and at the sentence level (word order): we show that change in these different domains is consistently shaped by a
bias towards monotonicity and uniformity in computation, such that points of nonuniformity in the relevant sequence can be predicted to be the gateway to change.
Crucially, this change systematically brings about a reduction in complexity; as
such, these factors are proposed as a new metric for linguistic complexity
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Formal approaches to complexity in heritage language grammars |
| Editors | Maria Polinsky, Michael T. Putnam |
| Publisher | Language Science Press |
| Chapter | 7 |
| Pages | 153-179 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |