Cognitive linguistics seminar
Speaker: Marie-Anne Markey (KU Leuven)
Title: Analogy’s fingerprints: testable predictions for the role of analogy in language change
Abstract: Although analogy has often been invoked as a mechanism for language change, its explanatory power remains controversial due to a lack of evidence (Fischer 2018; Lass 1998). In my PhD project I try to bridge that gap by looking for fingerprints left behind by analogy in language change. By tracing the emergence of adnumeral modifiers from prepositions (about 500 men attended the party; a population of around 180,000) in corpus data, I try to investigate those fingerprints on different levels of language. On the level of the speech community, change seems to happen faster when there is an analogical model. On the level of the individual speaker, speakers with better entrenched analogical models tend to pick up the innovation more readily. In the next case study, the effects of priming will be examined: can an analogical model prime the usage of an innovative construction?
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Cognitive linguistics seminar
Online via link invitation