none 10.1075/la.254.11kau John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 105482532 3260418 1420043 202507022313000057 10.1075 2025-07-02T21:14:15Z 2019-03-18T07:59:29Z 3 0166-0829 10.1075/la https://benjamins.com/ catalog/la Anne Breitbarth https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8300-8275 Miriam Bouzouita https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8196-620X Lieven Danckaert https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9660-0945 Melissa Farasyn While much of the literature has focused on explaining diachronic variation and change, the fact that sometimes change does not seem to happen has received much less attention. The current volume unites ten contributions that look for the determinants of diachronic stability, mainly in the areas of morphology and (morpho)syntax. The relevant question is approached from different angles, both empirical and theoretical. Empirically, the contributions deal with the absence of change where one may expect it, uncover underlying stability where traditionally diachronic change was postulated, and, inversely, superficial stability that disguises underlying change. Determining factors ranging from internal causes to language contact are explored. Theoretically, the questions of whether stable variation is possible, and how it can be modeled are addressed. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on the causes of language change, and to scholars working on the history of Germanic, Romance, and Sinitic languages. 254 3 20 2019 3 22 2019 9789027202413 9789027262752 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/la.254 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027262752 https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027262752.pdf https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/la.254/html Henri Kauhanen The University of Manchester https://ror.org/027m9bs27 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6743-5100 Abstract The Fundamental Theorem of Language Change ( Yang 2000 ) implies the impossibility of stable variation in the Variational Learning framework, but only in the special case where two, and not more, grammatical variants compete. Introducing the notion of an advantage matrix, I generalize Variational Learn-ing to situations where the learner receives input generated by more than two grammars, and show that diachronically stable variation is an intrinsic feature of several types of such multiple-grammar systems. This invites experimentalists to take the possibility of stable variation seriously and identifies one possible place where to look for it: situations of complex language contact. 3 20 2019 3 22 2019 263 290 10.1075/la.254.11kau https://benjamins.com/catalog/la.254.11kau https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/la.254.11kau/html Word Formation in Generative Grammar Aronoff 1976 10.7554/eLife.10778 10.1037/14496-000 10.1017/CBO9781139172455 10.1016/S0019-9958(67)91165-5 Individual and Population in Language Change: Mathematical Explorations of the Acquisition-Use Loop Kauhanen 2018 Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Parasession on Variation and Linguistic Theory Kroch 180 1994 Morphosyntactic variation 10.1016/j.lingua.2008.09.012 Learning Automata: An Introduction Narendra 1989 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199250691.003.0020 10.1353/lan.2016.0079 Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Yang 429 1999 A selectionist theory of language acquisition 10.1017/S0954394500123014 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199250691.003.0021 Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language Yang 2002 10.1016/j.tics.2004.08.006