Exact sampling with coupled Markov chains and applications to statistical mechanics
Proceedings of the seventh international conference on Random structures and algorithms
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
Combining data and mathematical models of language change
ACL '10 Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
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Both Middle English and Old French had a syntactic property called verb-second or V2 that disappeared. In this paper describes a simulation being developed to shed light on the question of why V2 is stable in some languages, but not others. The simulation, based on a Markov chain, uses fuzzy grammars where speakers can use an arbitrary mixture of idealized grammars. Thus, it can mimic the variable syntax observed in Middle English manuscripts. The simulation supports the hypotheses that children use the topic of a sentence for word order acquisition, that acquisition takes into account the ambiguity of grammatical information available from sample sentences, and that speakers prefer to speak with more regularity than they observe in the primary linguistic data.