Chapter 10

A variational theory of specialization in acquisition and diachrony

This article presents an empirical case study in the diachronic specialization of morphosyntactic forms for different syntactic contexts, and uses it to develop a theory of variational specialization. This theory links specialization in diachrony to specialization in language acquisition, sociolinguistic coordination in a speech community, and a general understanding of evolutionary dynamics. The case study illustrates these relationships with the specialization of melted and molten in Early Modern English, and tests the hypothesis that even diachronic specialization in a lexical domain will not take the same trajectory for different speakers, but that the community will nevertheless coordinate on a direction of specialization given multiple generations. In doing so, it answers a question referred to as Yang’s Paradox: how can we reconcile diachronic results showing that specialization is slow, with experimental results on acquisition showing that it’s fast? The study ultimately shows that specialization in a speech community is orders of magnitude slower than specialization for an individual child in an experimental setting, due to the problem of coordinating the dimension and direction of specialization among many speakers. I also show how Yang’s (2000) variational grammar learning model can be extended to the problem of specialization, and that children plausibly do not play an active role in specializing linguistic forms: they only need to identify potential contexts that the forms could specialize for, and the learning analog of natural selection does the rest.