[Puzzles in Language Change] plans for the next few weeks

[Igor Yanovich]

Dear everyone,

Just to give you an idea of what to expect: we'll see how the discussion
on Sep 9 goes, but my default plan is to use Sep 16 to finish the
discussion of Tagliamonte & D'Arcy (2009), if need be, and then discuss
two short chapters from a book by Amy Devitt (1989) on several
Anglicization changes in Scots English in the 16-17th centuries. It will
provide us with more examples for actual trajectories of change, so we can
see for ourselves how much they resemble "S-curves", and how they
correspond to the phenomena Tagliamonte & D'Arcy discuss.

After that, in Week 3, we'll discuss a very different paper, Reali &
Griffiths (2010), which is completely theoretical. Among other things it
claims to have derived the S-curve for linguistic changes from quite
simple assumptions, different from those of Tagliamonte & D'Arcy.

After that, we will turn to Kroch, which will feature more S-curves, the
Constant Rate Hypothesis, and the idea of competing grammars.


Best,
 Igor