This event will host a couple of conferences devoted to Language Change studied from empirical and modeling approaches. The first conference, at 9.30, will be given by Pr. Martin Hilpert (Linguistique anglaise, Université de Neuchâtel) on “The asymmetric priming hypothesis revisited”. From 11 am, Pr. Richard Blythe (Department of Physics, Edinburgh University) will  present his work on “Evolutionary forces in language change”.

This event is organized at the occasion of the thesis defense of Quentin Feltgen which will be held the day before (October 11th) in the Physics Department of the ENS (room E234 – Conf IV, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 PARIS) at 14h30.

Abstract:

Language change is a cultural evolutionary process that involves mechanisms of replication, mutation and selection that feature also in biological evolution. In this talk I will explain how this mechanisms are situated in an individual speaker’s linguistic behaviour, and how they shape the dynamics of language change at the macroscopic scale of populations. In particular, I shall show that – in common with biological evolution – purely neutral accounts can be hard to falsify and, by appealing to historical data for article grammaticalisation cycles, argue that rapid changes in individual speakers’ behaviour and heterogeneous social structures are key components of a plausible account of historical language change.