Generative Accounts of Change

Abstract

Generative approaches to synchronic linguistics attempt to describe what is part of a language in a mathematically precise way, and generative approaches to the history of English and other languages model diachronic changes as a sequence of stages of the language with differing formal properties. Formalising the grammars of these stages makes falsifiable predictions about what was grammatical in each stage. Generative accounts include phonological analysis, but this chapter focuses on accounts of morphosyntactic changes. Generativists take child language acquisition to be the locus of language change, which is assumed to occur when children are exposed to different Primary Linguistic Data from what older generations encountered, due to factors like phonological change and language contact. Syntactic changes that have been studied extensively within generative frameworks include the development of modal and other auxiliary verbs, clausal negation and changes in word order, particularly in the positioning of the tensed verb.