A Case Study of Prosody Driven Language Change. From Classical to Modern European Portuguese.

Prosody plays a crucial role in grammar selection, restricting the possible values of the parameters to be set. In the present work we present a formal account of this claim, using the Thermodynamical Formalism. In this framework, the sample of positive evidence presented to the child is chosen according to a Gibbs state defined by the potential associated to the prosody. Given a sample of sentences of the parental grammar and given a prosodic pattern, the child choses the grammar according to a maximum likelihood principle. We argue that such a model accounts for both language acquisition and language change. As an example we study the change in clitic placement from Classical to modern European Portuguese .

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