Richard Zimmermann’s latest paper is just out in Journal of Historical Syntax. The paper is titled “Testing causal associations in language change: The replacement of subordinating then with when in Middle English”, and it’s a beautiful display of what LEL does best: language change and data (note also the beautiful minimalist graphics). The paper is available Open Access here, and the abstract is below.
Richard is a busy bee these days, not just publishing impressive papers, but also attending the virtual ICAME (yes, that acronym again) conference in Heidelberg, where he is presenting a paper on a new measure of lexical dispersion.
Testing causal associations in language change: The replacement of subordinating then with when in Middle English
Abstract
Middle English changes the realization of temporal subordinators from a th-form (then) to a wh-form (when). The innovation is quantified with data from four syntactically parsed corpora. The change may have had an antecedent cause in the loss of subject-verb inversion after clause-initial adverb then. This view is supported by the time course of the two developments, the loss of subject-verb inversion slightly preceding the rise of wh-based subordination, as well as by the fact that the presence of alternative subordinating strategies inhibit the presence of wh-subordinators. The paper thus provides quantitative, empirical evidence for language-internally motivated change.
Manchet 
Posted on May 20, 2020 by manling