Sonja Gipper’s scientific contributions

In this paper, we investigate the rate of change of different person-number subject markers. We perform a cross-linguistic study on the dissimilarity between proto and modern forms, showing that 3SG is the most conservative subject marker across languages. We discuss the mechanisms that could explain this diachronic pattern, such as frequency of use, markedness, and attractor lengths. Our exploratory analysis highlights how existing linguistic datasets can be used to study new research questions.

Affixes change over time, especially under social dynamics, such as adult language contact (Lupyan & Dale, 2010; Sinnemäki & Di Garbo, 2018) and dialect contact (Trudgill, 1986). To study the mechanisms behind affix change, we propose to simulate communication between speakers using agent-based computer simulations (Smith, 2014) in conjunction with real-world data. We present two case studies, to illustrate how agent-based models allow studying complex interactions between mechanisms in affix change, particularly for conditions which are infeasible to manipulate in the real word. These case studies show that agent-based computer simulations can shed light on interacting mechanisms behind change of affixes: phonological processes playing a role in morphological simplification and conversational mechanisms influencing spread of innovations.