Real-Time Demonstration of the Interaction among Internal and External Factors in Language Change: A Corpus Study

Abstract

This research examines the interaction among internal and external factors in light of the interaction hypothesis, which assumes that, in language variation and change, internal factors are mutually independent, internal factors and external factors are also mutually independent, while external factors are interrelated. Thus far, there has been no exhaustive examination of the hypothesis based on the enormous amount of spontaneous speech in large-scale corpora, and interactions in the initial phases of language change have been underresearched. I therefore conducted a multivariate statistical examination of interactions of this kind focusing on recent language changes in Japanese verb forms (sa-Insertion, ra-Deletion, and re-Insertion) by making complementary use of two large-scale corpora: the on-line full-text database of the minutes of the Diet and the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. The results partially support the interaction hypothesis in the sense that the independence between internal and external factors is maintained consistently. On the other hand, some interactions between factors are observed, and the predicted interaction between external factors is not observed in one case. The fact that interactions between internal and external factors is never attested is indicative of a clear-cut division between the two in their roles governing language variation and change. Based on the results, I propose a revised interaction hypothesis, which assumes the existence of intracategorial interaction and the nonexistence of inter-categorial interaction among internal and external factors.

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