Workshop at ICHL28: Historical (Morpho)Syntax from a Psycholinguistic Perspective
26-30 juillet 2027, Reykjavík (Islande)
Date : 26-30 juillet 2027
Lieu : Reykjavík, Islande
Lien de l’événement : lien
Date limite de soumission : 1 décembre 2026
Comité d’organisation : Sophia Voigtmann (sophia.voigtmann@uni-bamberg.de) Bamberg University & Joanna H. Wall (joanna.wall@meertens.knaw.nl) Meertens Institute & Utrecht University
Modalités de soumission : Written in English. Maximum length (excluding references) 500 words. PDF format. Please clearly indicate that your abstract is for this workshop when you submit it to EasyAbs: https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/ICHL28/
Argumentaire :
Psycholinguistic concepts have long been given a central role in explanatory accounts of language change across different theoretical frameworks. Whilst the obvious impossibility of experimental research previously posed a challenge, developments in large corpora, artificial language research and computational methods in recent years have significantly increased the possibilities for investigating language change, historical language data and the variation therein through the lens of psycholinguistics (Hundt et al. 2017, 2025). This research and the workshop address questions like:
- How can psycholinguistic models of production and/or comprehension account for patterns of historical variation?
- To what extent can psycholinguistic concepts explain the emergence, diffusion, and loss of (morpho)syntactic constructions?
- How can psycholinguistic approaches complement or challenge traditional functional, formal, and usage-based explanations of historical syntax?
- What methodological problems arise when psycholinguistic hypotheses are tested against historical data, and how can they be addressed?
To shed more light on these questions, the workshop aims to bring together linguists working on historical (morpho)syntax from all theoretical backgrounds who use psycholinguistic approaches on their data. Its broader goals are, thus, to discuss the methodological challenges in psycho-historical linguistics (term used by Winters 2017) and explore how the concepts and methods from psycholinguistics can contribute to the understanding of historical syntactic variation and diachronic change.
As already noted, psycho-historical linguistic research has been growing in recent years. Among others, priming (Bock 1986) has been invoked to account for “the development from spatial to temporal expressions” (Jäger and Rosenbach 2008, 91) and the emergence of -ing-complements in English (Meisezahl and Walkden 2026). Furthermore, frequency effects (e.g. Jescheniak and Levelt 1994; Ellis 2002) have been used to investigate morphosyntactic language change such as word class changes (De Smet 2016). The preceding concepts also provide a link to theories of language acquisition. The Tolerance and the Sufficiency Principle (Yang 2016), a mathematical model of language acquisition, has, for example, modelled valency changes in Middle English psych verbs (Trips and Rainsford 2022; Trips et al. 2026).
Furthermore, Hundt et al. (2025) emphasise the importance of, among others, salience (Ariel 2001), analogy (Gentner 2003), prediction (also Pickering and Gambi 2018) and ambiguity (Tuggy 1993) for research in language history. There is also a growing research interest in how the overarching concept of processing influences historical variation and diachronic change of, for example, word order change in German infinitival constructions (De Cesare et al. 2024).
Finally, the advent of large language models creates new possibilities for the application information theory (Shannon 1948) and surprisal (Hale 2001; Levy 2008), which calculate the information content of a unit in a given context and have been strongly linked to processing (e.g. Demberg and Keller 2008). These notions were, for instance, applied to the change of OV to VO in English and Icelandic (Wallenberg et al. 2021) and the variation of word order in the German middle field (Voigtmann and Wall 2026), although their application to historical data still presents challenges.
Taken together, these studies demonstrate the potential of psycholinguistic approaches to historical syntax, an area that will certainly grow in the future.
Références :
Ariel, Mira. 2001. ‘Accessibility Theory: An Overview’. In Human Cognitive Processing, edited by Ted J. M. Sanders, Joost Schilperoord, and Wilbert Spooren, vol. 8. John Benjamins.
Bock, J. Kathryn. 1986. ‘Syntactic Persistence in Language Production’. Cognitive Psychology 18 (3): 355–87.
De Cesare, Ilaria, Sina Bosch, Claudia Felser, and Ulrike Demske. 2024. ‘Word Order Change in German Infinitival Complementation: The Role of Processing Factors’. Diachronica 41 (5): 575–604.
De Smet, Hendrik. 2016. ‘How Gradual Change Progresses: The Interaction between Convention and Innovation’. Language Variation and Change 28 (1): 83–102.
Demberg, Vera, and Frank Keller. 2008. ‘Data from Eye-Tracking Corpora as Evidence for Theories of Syntactic Processing Complexity’. Cognition 109 (2): 193–210.
Ellis, Nick C. 2002. ‘Frequency Effects in Language Processing: A Review with Implications for Theories of Implicit and Explicit Language Acquisition’. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24 (2): 143–88.
Gentner, Dedre. 2003. ‘Why We’re So Smart’. In Language in Mind, edited by Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow. MIT Press.
Hale, John. 2001. ‘A Probabilistic Earley Parser as a Psycholinguistic Model’. Proceedings of the Second Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Language Technologies (USA), NAACL ’01, 1–8.
Hundt, Marianne, Sandra Mollin, and Simone E. Pfenninger, eds. 2017. The Changing English Language: Psycholinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge University Press.
Hundt, Marianne, Simone E. Pfenninger, and Sandra Mollin. 2025. ‘Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Language Change’. In The New Cambridge History of the English Language, 1st edn, edited by Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg. Cambridge University Press.
Jäger, Gerhard, and Anette Rosenbach. 2008. ‘Priming and Unidirectional Language Change’. Theoretical Linguistics 34 (2): 85–113.
Jescheniak, Jörg D., and Willem J. M. Levelt. 1994. ‘Word Frequency Effects in Speech Production: Retrieval of Syntactic Information and of Phonological Form.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20 (4): 824–43.
Levy, Roger. 2008. ‘Expectation-Based Syntactic Comprehension’. Cognition 106 (3): 1126– 77.
Meisezahl, Marc, and George Walkden. 2026. ‘The -Ing-Spiracy: The Role of Priming in the Rise of English -Ing-Complements’. DiGS27 Diachronic Generative Syntax, Padua, Italy, June 18.
Pickering, Martin J., and Chiara Gambi. 2018. ‘Predicting While Comprehending Language: A Theory and Review.’ Psychological Bulletin 144 (10): 1002–44.
Shannon, Claude E. 1948. ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’. The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (3): 379–423.
Trips, Carola, and Thomas Rainsford. 2022. ‘Tolerating Subject-Experiencers?’ Journal of Historical Syntax, October 14, 1–43.
Trips, Carola, Tara Struik, and Lena Kaltenbach. 2026. ‘Language Contact and Language Change: Contact-Induced Structural Change in Medieval England’. In International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.
Tuggy, David. 1993. ‘Ambiguity, Polysemy, and Vagueness’. Cognitive Linguistics 4 (3): 273–90.
Voigtmann, Sophia, and Joanna Wall. 2026. ‘Double Object Order in Historic German: A Unified Processing Perspective with New Data from Pronominal Constructions’. Journal of Historical Syntax 10 (6): 1–66.
Wallenberg, Joel C., Rachael Bailes, Christine Cuskley, and Anton Karl Ingason. 2021. ‘Smooth Signals and Syntactic Change’. Languages 6 (60).
Winters, Margaret E. 2017. ‘Psycho-Historical Linguistics: Its Context and Potential’. English Language and Linguistics 21 (2): 413–21.
Yang, Charles D. 2016. The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language. The MIT Press.