Markov Models for Multi-state Language Change

Abstract

Historical linguistics has witnessed an upsurge in quantitative corpus studies. The bulk of these studies involve the use of regression modelling. We point out a number of potential problems with this approach, and offer an alternative. For a multi-state language change, we propose a Markov model in continuous time. The major advantage of this technique, which has been used in medical contexts, is that it is especially geared towards dealing with time as a variable of interest, while it still allows one to look at the effect of several covariates. In this proof-of-concept article, we look at morphological shifts in preterites in Dutch, from 800ad to 2000ad (n = 14,314). This is a well-researched field, allowing us to investigate the performance of the multi-state Markov model.

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