New Empirical Approaches to Grammatical Variation and Change

Dear Colleagues,

Theories of grammatical variation and change have traditionally been informed by corpus data. However, with the use of experimental methods becoming more widespread in linguistic research, a growing number of studies are combining corpus analysis with experimental investigation. The availability of large annotated corpora has opened up new opportunities for studying grammatical variation and change, and advances in statistical modeling have led to novel analysis methods being applied to both synchronic and diachronic corpus data. Models of language change often invoke notions such as economy, efficiency, and processing ease to account for the replacement of one grammatical variant for another, but they typically base their assumptions on insights drawn from work on language acquisition, language disorders, or cross-linguistic distribution. Methods that tap into real-time language processing allow us to test these claims more directly by examining how processing factors affect speakers’ grammatical preferences and constrain variability. Using experimental methods such as acceptability judgements, comprehension or production tasks also allows us to assess the extent to which corpus frequencies can predict speakers’ grammatical choices and preferences in variation contexts. Although some of these studies have revealed imperfect correlations between corpus frequency and acceptability, or between corpus frequency and processing difficulty, our understanding of the role of usage frequency in determining the success of a given variant is still rather limited. To formally capture permissible variation and gradient acceptability, models of grammar may be required which allow for gradience by employing weighted linguistic constraints. This Special Issue seeks to draw together research that uses experimental, multimethodological or other innovative approaches to the study of synchronic or diachronic grammatical variation and change, with the aim of highlighting the potential benefits of such approaches and outlining possible directions for future research. We welcome original research articles, methodological articles, perspective articles, hypothesis and theory articles, and brief commentaries/opinion pieces.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• The role of usage frequency and processing-related factors in grammatical change;
• Quantitative approaches to diachronic corpus data;
• Computational modeling of grammatical variation or change;
• Using constraint-based models of grammar to capture gradience in variation contexts.

The tentative completion schedule is as follows:

-Abstract submission deadline: 30th July 2020

-Notification of abstract acceptance: 15th August 2020

-Full manuscript deadline: 30th November 2020

Abstracts can be sent to the Guest Editors of this volume or to Languages editorial office (languages@mdpi.com). The full manuscript should be no more than 12000 words in length.

Dr. Sina Bosch
Ms. Ilaria De Cesare (M.A.)
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Demske
Dr. Claudia Felser
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.