The Changing English Language Psycholinguistic Perspectives

Bringing together experts from both historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors in language change from the perspectives of both fields. It explores the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach, covering the following factors: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acquisition. Easily accessible, the book features chapters by psycholinguists presenting cutting edge research on core factors and processes and develops a model of how this may be involved in language change. Each chapter is complemented with one or several case study in the history of the English language in which the psycholinguistic factor in question may be argued to have played a decisive role. Thus, for the first time, a single volume provides a platform for an integrated exchange between psycholinguistics and historical linguistics on the question of how language changes over time.

1. Introduction: language history meets psychology Marianne Hundt, Sandra Mollin and Simone E. Pfenninger; Part I. Frequency: 2. The Ecclesiastes principle in language change Harald Baayen, Fabian Tomaschek, Susanne Gahl and Michael Ramscar; 3. Frequencies in diachronic corpora and knowledge of language Martin Hilpert; Part II. Salience: 4. Salience in language usage, learning, and change Nick C. Ellis; 5. Low salience as an enabling factor in morphosyntactic change Elizabeth C. Traugott; Part III. Chunking: 6. Chunking in language usage, learning, and change: I don't know Nick C. Ellis; 7. Chunking and changes in compositionality in context Joan L. Bybee and Carol Lynn Moder; Part IV. Priming: 8. Priming and language change Martin J. Pickering and Simon Garrod; 9. From priming and processing to frequency effects and grammaticalisation? Contracted semi-modals in present-day English Christian Mair; Part V. Analogy: 10. The role of analogy in language processing and acquisition Heike Behrens; 11. The role of analogy in language change: supporting constructions Hendrik de Smet and Olga Fischer; Part VI. Ambiguity: 12. Syntactic ambiguity in real-time language processing and diachronic change Claudia Felser; 13. Ambiguity and vagueness in historical change David Denison; Part VII. Acquisition and Transmission: 14. Developing language from usage: explaining errors Elena V. M. Lieven; 15. Transferring insights from child language acquisition to diachronic change (and vice versa) María José López-Cous.

Marianne Hundt is Professor of English Linguistics at Universität Zürich. Her research interests include grammatical variation and change in World Englishes. As a corpus-linguist, she has compiled and worked with corpora in World Englishes research and historical linguistics. She is the author of English Mediopassive Constructions (2007), co-author of Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study (2009) and co-editor of English World-Wide.
Sandra Mollin is senior lecturer in English Linguistics at the Universität Heidelberg. Her research focuses on phraseology, varieties of English and the combination of corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic methodology. She is the author of The (Ir)Reversibility of English Binomials (2014) and Euro-English: Assessing Variety Status (2006).
Simone E. Pfenninger is Assistant Professor at Universität Salzburg. Her principal research areas are multilingualism, psycholinguistics and individual differences in second language acquisition, especially in regard to quantitative approaches and statistical methods and techniques for language application in education. She is the co-editor of the Second Language Acquisition book series for Multilingual Matters.