Analyzing imperfective games

Igor Yanovich

doi:10.3765/sp.10.17

Abstract

Deo 2015 is the first study applying mathematically explicit evolutionary analysis to a specific semantic-change phenomenon, namely the progressive-imperfective diachronic cycle. However, Deo’s actual results do not match completely the empirical observations about that cycle. Linguistic communities passing through the cycle often employ, in the synchrony, a single common type of progressive-imperfective grammar. In Deo’s modeling results, however, two of the grammars never get shared by nearly all the population, including the grammar with the obligatory use of progressive marking in semantically progressive contexts, as in Present-Day English. This paper improves on that wrong prediction. The crucial modeling decision enabling the improvement is switching from the assumption of infinite speaker population to the more realistic, but harder to analyze finite population setting. The finite-population version of Deo’s model derives stages where at many time points, all or almost all speakers share the same grammar. Interestingly, two different a priori reasonable types of trajectories with that feature emerge, depending on the parameter settings. These two trajectory types constitute novel empirical predictions regarding the shape of the cycle generated by (the proposed extension of) Deo’s model. Supplementary materials (SM 1 and SM 2) BibTeX info

Highlights

Deo 2015 is the first study applying mathematically explicit evolutionary analysis to a specific semantic-change phenomenon, namely the progressive-imperfective diachronic cycle
The progressive-imperfective cycle of semantic change is as follows. It starts with grammar (a) where only one linguistic form X is used for both progressive and imperfective meanings
At stage (c), the younger marker Y becomes obligatory for progressive meanings, while older X is still retained for imperfective ones

Summary

Why evolutionary modeling for semantic change?

A familiar approach to semantic change frames it in terms of broad stages. For each historical stage, we identify the forms present, their ranges of meanings, and the change pathways that connect the form-meaning pairings from different stages. Deo (2015) analyzes the progressive-imperfective semantic-change cycle at the sanity-check level She demonstrates that her substantive semantic theory of the progressive and the imperfective, together with specific assumptions about misacquisition of progressive-imperfective grammars and specific assumptions she makes about the evolutionary laws governing grammar spread and loss, together induce cyclic shifting behavior in a modeled population of speakers. In this reply, I aim at both the sanity-check level, improving on Deo 2015 therein, and at the range-of-predictions level. They should not be dismissed out of hand for clearly being simpler than the reality

Deo’s evolutionary setup

Findings

Improving upon Deo’s results: finite populations