Abstract
Languages change due to social, cultural, and cognitive influences. In this paper, we provide an assessment of these cognitive influences on diachronic change in the vocabulary. Previously, tests of stability and change of vocabulary items have been conducted on small sets of words where diachronic change is imputed from cladistics studies. Here, we show for a substantially larger set of words that stability and change in terms of documented borrowings of words into English and into Dutch can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties of words that reflect their representational fidelity. We found that grammatical category, word length, age of acquisition, and frequency predict borrowing rates, but frequency has a non-linear relationship. Frequency correlates negatively with probability of borrowing for high-frequency words, but positively for low-frequency words. This borrowing evidence documents recent, observable diachronic change in the vocabulary enabling us to distinguish between change associated with transmission during language acquisition and change due to innovations by proficient speakers.
Highlights
An adequate model of diachronic language change must establish the drivers of change, and uncover the properties of the communicative system that result in stability of language structure (Croft, 2000)
In a linear model of the multiple psycholinguistic predictors of rate of lexical change, with grammatical category included as a random effect, we replicated the effect observed by Pagel et al (2007) of a significant main effect of frequency on rate of lexical change (β = −0.312, SE = 0.086, p < 0.001)
The effect of frequency for rates of lexical change corresponds to the result found for the relation between mid- to highfrequency words in the loanword database analysis, where increasing frequency related to lower levels of borrowing
Summary
An adequate model of diachronic language change must establish the drivers of change, and uncover the properties of the communicative system that result in stability of language structure (Croft, 2000). Pagel et al.’s (2007) approach aligns the parallel traditions of social and cognitive approaches to language change: language usage models can be related to the psycholinguistic analysis of the effect of frequency In another recent study on a subset of the Swadesh word list, Vejdemo and Hörberg (2016) confirmed that higher frequency words and a distinction between nouns and verbs were predictors of greater stability of word forms, and in addition high imageability and a small number of synonymous meanings for the word form were protective factors against change. In Study 4, we tested whether word length from Old English, rather than a contemporary measure of word length as used in Studies 1 to 3, predicted whether a word would be borrowed or not subsequent to the Old English period
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