Formalizing linguists' intuitions of language change as a dynamical system, we quantify the time course of language change including sudden vs. gradual changes in languages. We apply the computer model to the historical loss of Verb Second from Old French to modern French, showing that otherwise adequate grammatical theories can fail our new evolutionary criterion. Copyright c fl Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995 This report describes research done at the Center for Biological and Computational Learning and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the Center is provided in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation under contract ASC--9217041. Robert C. Berwick was also supported by Vinton-Hayes Fellowship. 1 Introduction Language scientists have long been occupied with describing phonological, syntactic, and semantic change, often appealing to an analogy between language change and evolution, but rarely goi...
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