How Long Was the Nineteenth Century?

Abstract

This paper reviews the problems of the deterministic and predictive view of language change initiated by nineteenth century linguists and shows that such a view is still present in many analyses proposed by twentieth century linguists. As an alternative to such a view, the paper discusses an approach along the lines of Niyogi and Berwick (1997), which takes the explanation for long-term tendencies to be a function of the architecture of UG and the learning procedure and of the way in which populations of speakers behave.