No abstract

Although language acquisition is frequently invoked as a cause of syntactic change, there has been relatively little work applying a formal model of acquisition to an actual case of language change and testing its predictions empirically. Here we test the model of Yang (2000) on the historical case of the loss of verb movement to Tense (V-toT) in Faroese and Mainland Scandinavian, using quantitative data from a number of corpora. We show that the model straightforwardly predicts the historical data, given minimal and uncontroversial assumptions about Scandinavian syntax. In contrast to a number of previous attempts to explain this repeated pattern of change, it is not necessary to appeal to any bias against learning structures involving V-toT a welcome result, given current evidence from acquisition. The newer V-in-situ parameter setting overcomes the original V-toT grammar because it is more learnable in a language that also has embedded verb-second (EV2). Finally, we argue that the course of the diachronic change is evidence against a strong version of the "Rich Agreement Hypothesis" (RAH), but that under this account the stability of V-toT in Icelandic provides evidence for the weaker version (cf. Bobaljik 2002).

This study describes a change in which relative clause extraposition is in the process of being lost in English, Icelandic, French, and Portuguese. This current change in progress has never been observed before, probably because it is so slow that it is undetectable without the aid of multiple diachronic parsed corpora (treebanks) with time depths of over 500 years each. Building on insights from Kiparsky (1995), the study shows that the change may date as far back as the innovation of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Romance relative clauses, as these varieties differentiated from Proto-Indo-European. It also shows that the unusually slow speed of the change is due to partial specialization of the construction along the dimension of prosodic weight, following the argument made at greater length in Fruehwald & Wallenberg 2016. Finally, the change is shown to have important consequences for the syntax of extraposition, supporting the adjunction analysis of Culicover and Rochemont (1990). The article also discusses the implications of Sauerland's (2003) analysis of English relative clauses, and while modern English data supports his analysis, the diachronic extraposition data is not yet fine-grained enough to bear on the 'raising' analysis of relatives in general. This is identified as an important question for further research on this change.

This paper investigates the relationship between organizational effects of pre-natal testosterone and the use of "tomboy" as a descriptor for young women. We show in a sample of 44 women that a woman's right hand 2D:4D ratio is a significant predictor of whether they will be labeled as a "tomboy", with a decrease in 2D:4D ratio corresponding to an increase in the probability of being called "tomboy". Taking the right hand 2D:4D ratio as a proxy for the abundance of testosterone in the early life hormonal milieu, we propose that organizing effects of higher pre-natal T lead to increased masculine-typical behavior in childhood, which increases the likelihood some women will be referred to as tomboys. We suggest that the increase in masculine-typical behaviors is a result of how the organizing effects of T on the brain interact with children's social modeling of male-coded and female-coded behaviors.

Over the past decade and a half, several lines of research have investigated aspects of the smooth signalling redundancy hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that speakers distribute the information in linguistic utterances as evenly as possible, in order to make the utterance more robust against noise for the hearer. Several studies have shown evidence for this hypothesis in limited linguistic domains, showing that speakers manipulate acoustic and syntactic features to avoid drastic spikes or troughs in information content. In theory, the mechanism behind this is that these spikes would make utterances more vulnerable to noise events, and thus, communicative failure. However, this previous work doesn't consider information density across entire utterances, and only rarely has this mechanism been directly explored. Here, we introduce a new descriptive statistic that quantifies the uniformity of information across an entire utterance, alongside an algorithm that can measure the uniformity of actual utterances against an optimized distribution. Using a simple simulation, we show that utterances optimized for more uniform distributions of information are, in fact, more robust against noise.