{"title":"On cause and correlation in language change: Word order and clefting in Brazilian Portuguese","authors":"Malte Rosemeyer, Freek Van de Velde","doi":"10.1163/22105832-01001500","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Studies of language change frequently wrestle with the problem of cause and correlation. It is comparatively simple to observe a correlation between historical trends. However, it is much more difficult to demonstrate that the changes in the frequency of a construction A were indeed the cause of the changes in the frequency of a construction B. We present a statistical method that can help to assess whether two historical changes are not only correlated, but also causally related. In particular, we use Granger Causality to determine whether the gradual replacement of ex-situ <em>wh</em>-interrogatives with clefted <em>wh</em>-interrogatives in 18th to 20th century Brazilian Portuguese resulted from word order change, and particularly the rise in the frequency of <span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">SV</span> word order. Our results indeed suggest that <span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">SV</span> word order Granger-causes the use of clefted <em>wh</em>-interrogatives, as well as declarative ‘that’-clefts, but not the other way around.</p>","PeriodicalId":43113,"journal":{"name":"Language Dynamics and Change","volume":"183 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2021-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language Dynamics and Change","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-01001500","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Studies of language change frequently wrestle with the problem of cause and correlation. It is comparatively simple to observe a correlation between historical trends. However, it is much more difficult to demonstrate that the changes in the frequency of a construction A were indeed the cause of the changes in the frequency of a construction B. We present a statistical method that can help to assess whether two historical changes are not only correlated, but also causally related. In particular, we use Granger Causality to determine whether the gradual replacement of ex-situ wh-interrogatives with clefted wh-interrogatives in 18th to 20th century Brazilian Portuguese resulted from word order change, and particularly the rise in the frequency of SV word order. Our results indeed suggest that SV word order Granger-causes the use of clefted wh-interrogatives, as well as declarative ‘that’-clefts, but not the other way around.
期刊介绍：
Language Dynamics and Change (LDC) is an international peer-reviewed journal that covers both new and traditional aspects of the study of language change. Work on any language or language family is welcomed, as long as it bears on topics that are also of theoretical interest. A particular focus is on new developments in the field arising from the accumulation of extensive databases of dialect variation and typological distributions, spoken corpora, parallel texts, and comparative lexicons, which allow for the application of new types of quantitative approaches to diachronic linguistics. Moreover, the journal will serve as an outlet for increasingly important interdisciplinary work on such topics as the evolution of language, archaeology and linguistics (‘archaeolinguistics’), human genetic and linguistic prehistory, and the computational modeling of language dynamics.
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