STARFISH

Languages are dynamic and new syntactic features may be imported over time, such as changes in word order and shifts in the relationships between certain words and phrases. Is this related to the number of adults learning a second language? We spoke to Professor George Walkden, Dr Henri Kauhanen and Molly Rolf about their research into this and other questions.

The movement of populations can shape and influence the evolution of language, as different groups may import or acquire certain features of each others’ language over time. A lot of the modern syntactic features of English for example could be related to contact with people from Scandinavia around 1,000 years ago. “The two languages – Old English and Old Norse – would probably have been mutually intelligible. That contact had an impact on the structure of the language,” says Professor George Walkden. As the Principal Investigator of the STARFISH project, Professor Walkden is now investigating how acquiring a second language affects the structure of a language over its history. laboratory and corpus data. “These kinds of resources are available, and we are making full use of them,” says Dr Henri Kauhanen, a post-doc researcher in the project. One of the major aims in the project is to understand how

We want to test whether the social and historical factors that we’re interested in play a role in language change. We’re particularly interested in the effect of acquiring a second language.

Second language

There are certain syntactic features of languages like German that a non-native speaker may find difficult to master. An English person learning German as a second language might struggle with its slightly different word order for example. “Sometimes, we find the verb at the end of the sentence where in English it might not be. So you might hear English speakers reverting back to the English structure of putting the verb in the middle of the sentence rather than at the end,” explains Molly Rolf, a PhD student working on the project. Professor Walkden and his colleagues are looking at historical texts to investigate the extent to which this type of shift occurred in the past, and whether it was related to people acquiring a second language. “We can collect comparable texts from different periods in the history of the same language – maybe before and after a big socio-historical event – and see what the changes are,” he says.

Researchers are also looking at historical records to assess how many people from different linguistic backgrounds were in a particular region at a particular time, so that linguistic evidence from the texts can be correlated with data on population movements and social changes. A further important source is empirical data on how people acquire language, including both linguistic innovations, such as a new positioning of the verb in the sentence, spread through speaker populations. “From a linguistic point of view, such changes are radical, and at present we lack a detailed understanding of the population dynamics,” says Dr Kauhanen. “To make progress, we use computational and mathematical models to create an artificial ‘laboratory’ in which processes of language change can be simulated. The simulation outcomes are then compared against the empirical record.”

The important proviso here is that these developments tend to take a lot of time, and the underlying reasons why are not currently well understood, a topic of great interest in the project. One aspect of this is that people may adapt the way they communicate to reflect the linguistic knowledge of others around them. “For example if you’re talking with someone who isn’t completely fluent in your language, you might speak in a way that you think is simpler to try and help them understand. That can have an effect on how the language is learned and how it changes,” explains Rolf. This research is focused on specific regions, such as the Balkans, Western Europe and Latin America, yet the hope is to identify wider trends relevant to all languages, with Professor Walkden and his colleagues currently working

The STARFISH team.

through the data. “We want to test whether the social and historical factors that we’re interested in play a role in language change. We’re particularly interested in the effect of acquiring a second language,” he says.

STARFISH

Sociolinguistic Typology and Responsive Features in Syntactic History This project has received funding from the ERC (European Research Council) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 851423. Project Coordinator, George Walkden PO Box D 175, Universität Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany T: +49 7531 88 3555 E: george.walkden@uni-konstanz.de W: https://www.ling.uni-konstanz.de/en/ walkden/starfish/

George Walkden is Professor of English Linguistics and General Linguistics at the University of Konstanz. He works on language change and syntax, particularly in the context of the Germanic languages. Henri Kauhanen is a post-doctoral researcher and complex systems scientist who formulates mathematical models to discover what is and what isn’t universal in the dynamics of human language. Gemma McCarley, Raquel Montero and Molly Rolf are PhD candidates researching syntactic change in Spanish, the Germanic languages and Balkan Slavic using corpora. Sarah Einhaus is a Masters student research assistant working on corpus construction and aiding the whole team in various ways.