RAPID NODE CONSTRUCTION AS A STABLE PRESSURE IN LANGUAGE CHANGE Evidence from the OV→VO-change in Swedish Evidence from the OV→VO-change in Swedish

Abstract

The theoretical focus of this thesis is the effect that performance in parsing syntactic structure (Hawkins, 1994) has on language change. The empirical focus is the OV→VO-change in Swedish and how it relates to a) the heaviness of the object b) ambiguity/syncretism in case marking on nominal arguments.

Integrating Hawkins’ Performance Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (PGCH) (1994; 2004; 2014) into Ritt’s evolutionary-memetic approach to language change (2004) I propose that performance in parsing syntactic structure constitutes a stable selection pressure on linguistic form-replication.

The effect that object heaviness has had on the OV→VO-change in Swedish is tested using a logistic regression model with object length (in words) serving as the predictor of OV/VO in transitive clauses with a finite auxiliary (AuxO-clauses) in four historical Swedish texts.

For the same AuxO-clauses, ambiguity in case marking is measured calculating the Shannon entropy on how well a certain form indicates its’ Grandmother node G (S/VP). This measure is correlated with the aggregate IC-to-word ratios for the same AuxO-clauses using Spearman’s rank order correlation.

The findings are these: 1) there is a clear positive correlation between the heaviness of the object and VO-preference in the history of Swedish. 2) Ambiguity in case forms is positively correlated with increased rapidity in constituent recognition through word order (represented by the IC-to-word ratio measure). 3) A performancememetic approach to the OV→VO-change is a better account than prior ones (see Delsing, 1999) of why certain objects and object types persevere in OVconfigurations.