Breitbarth A. et al. (eds.) The Determinants of Diachronic Stability

Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2019. — VI, 294 p. — (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today Series, Volume 254).While much of the literature has focused on explaining diachronic variation and change, the fact that sometimes change does not seem to happen has received much less attention. The current volume unites ten contributions that look for the determinants of diachronic stability, mainly in the areas of morphology and (morpho)syntax. The relevant question is approached from different angles, both empirical and theoretical. Empirically, the contributions deal with the absence of change where one may expect it, uncover underlying stability where traditionally diachronic change was postulated, and, inversely, superficial stability that disguises underlying change. Determining factors ranging from internal causes to language contact are explored. Theoretically, the questions of whether stable variation is possible, and how it can be modeled are addressed. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on the causes of language change, and to scholars working on the history of Germanic, Romance, and Sinitic languages.That human languages are constantly evolving is an undeniable fact. By now, theories have become very apt at dealing with linguistic variation and change. The reality is that populations are indeed in constant flux, socially and linguistically. Much of what used to be considered ‘internally-caused change’ might perhaps more appropriately have to be considered as contact-induced on the level of contact between varieties of a single diasystem. This realization turns the faithful stable transmission of linguistic features into an urgent explanandum. Different linguistic subfields have responded to this in different ways, and many questions still need to be addressed.The current volume unites ten contributions that look for the determinants of diachronic stability, mainly in the areas of morphology and (morpho)syntax. The relevant question is approached from different angles, and both empirical and theoretical considerations are taken into account. First, there are two chapters looking for the causes of stability in concrete empirical cases of morphology and syntax (2.1), followed by four chapters uncovering syntactic stability where traditionally, diachronic change was postulated (2.2). The next two chapters turn to the role of language contact in particular empirical cases (2.3), followed by two chapters addressing the mathematical modelling of (un)stable variation under an acquisitional model inspired by Yang’s (2000, 2002) variational learning algorithm (2.4).