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Writer's pictureRoberta D'Alessandro

New paper on monotonicity in language change

New paper with Silvia Terenghi on the #monotonicitybias in language change.

This paper presents some evidence that language change responds to what we call the "monotonicity bias" (see also Terenghi 2022, 2023 for an extensive study). Sequences of functional heads, within given domains, respond to external sollicitation by the contact language being constrained by this bias, which tends to eliminate the values that interrupt monotonicity. Phi features obey this constraint both in contact and in diachrony.

Feedback and questions: very welcome! You can download the paper here


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