An Investigation of the Impact of Frequency on the Development of Latin to Spanish by Fiona M. Wilson B.A., Simon Fraser University, 2012 Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Linguistics Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Fiona M. Wilson 2015 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Spring 2015 Approval Name: Fiona Wilson Degree: Master of Arts Title: An Investigation of the Impact of Frequency on the Development of Latin to Spanish Examining Committee: Chair: Chung-Hye Han Professor Panayiotis Pappas Senior Supervisor Associate Professor Arne Mooers Supervisor Professor Maite Taboada Supervisor Professor Alexandra D’Arcy External Examiner Associate Professor Department of Linguistics University of Victoria Date Defended/Approved: February 27, 2015 ii Partial Copyright Licence iii Abstract Previous research has suggested a relationship between frequency of use (FoU) and language change (Pagel, Atkinson, & Meade, 2007), but its nature remains unclear. Two research questions were raised in this thesis: 1) whether FoU remains stable over time, 2) whether amount of language change over time can be predicted using FoU. A 1147-word subset of the IDS wordlist (Key & Comrie, 2007) was used to test these questions. The FoU of both Latin and Spanish, and amount of change for each word was measured. There was a lower correlation across time than cross-linguistically, but the effect of genre could not be removed. A weak, highly significant negative relationship between FoU and amount of change was identified, supporting the claim that high frequency words change less than low frequency words. There is an intriguing correlation between FoU and lexical change, but the causal mechanism is not yet understood. iv Acknowledgements This research was made possible due to support from the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Award Ref. No.: 766-2012-0950). As well as support from Dr. Mark Collard and the SFU Human Evolutionary Studies Program. During the course of this project, a number of people have allowed me to make use of their considerable expertise; without their guidance, this thesis would never have been completed. I would therefore like to thank my senior supervisor, Dr. Panayiotis Pappas, as well Dr. Arne Mooers and Dr. Maite Taboada for their assistance. I would also like to express my appreciation to the members of Dr. Mooers’ lab for their feedback and suggestions, in particular Gordon Smith and Karen Gordon for their assistance with the statistical analysis and data extraction. I am also grateful for the suggestions of Brian Corrie and Chris Carleton with regard to database functionality, and to Dr. Nancy Hedberg for input on semantic categorization. Finally, thank you to my friends and colleagues in the Linguistics department, as well as my family and partner, whose unwavering support is incalculably valuable to me. v Table of Contents Approval .............................................................................................................................ii Partial Copyright Licence .................................................................................................. iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ..............................................................................................................vi List of Tables ................................................................................................................... viii List of Figures....................................................................................................................ix List of Acronyms ................................................................................................................ x Chapter 1. Introduction ............................................................................................... 1 1.1. Overview .................................................................................................................. 1 1.2. Parallels between Evolutionary Biology and Historical linguistics ............................ 2 1.2.1. The role of frequency of use in lexical change ............................................ 4 1.2.2. Lexical change within a single lineage ........................................................ 5 1.2.3. Issues raised ............................................................................................... 6 Issue 1. The role of frequency of use in language change ...................................... 6 Issue 2. Stability of frequency of use over time ....................................................... 6 1.3. Role of Frequency of use in Language .................................................................... 7 1.3.1. Frequency of use in synchronic linguistics .................................................. 7 1.3.2. Frequency of use in diachronic linguistics................................................... 9 1.4. The Stability of Frequency of Use .......................................................................... 15 1.4.1. Implications of stability of frequency of use............................................... 15 1.4.2. Previous attempts to address the stability of frequency of use ................. 16 1.4.3. Basis for judging similarity ........................................................................ 21 1.4.4. Research questions .................................................................................. 22 Chapter 2. Methodology ............................................................................................ 24 2.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................ 24 2.2. Wordlist .................................................................................................................. 24 2.3. Corpora .................................................................................................................. 27 2.3.1. Perseus Corpus ........................................................................................ 27 Description of the corpus ....................................................................................... 27 Extraction procedures ............................................................................................ 28 Use of weighted frequency .................................................................................... 29 Problematic cases .................................................................................................. 30 2.3.2. Corpus del Español ................................................................................... 31 Description of the corpus ....................................................................................... 31 Extraction procedures ............................................................................................ 31 Use of maximum frequency ................................................................................... 32 2.4. Coding .................................................................................................................... 32 2.4.1. Code 0: Sound Change ............................................................................ 34 2.4.2. Code 1: Paradigm Leveling ....................................................................... 34 2.4.3. Code 2: General analogy .......................................................................... 35 2.4.4. Code 3: Syntactic reanalysis ..................................................................... 37 vi 2.4.5. Code 4: Semantic change ......................................................................... 37 2.4.6. Code 5: Lexical Borrowing ........................................................................ 39 Chapter 3. Stability of Frequency of use from Latin to Spanish ........................... 43 3.1. Testing Pagel et al.’s Results ................................................................................. 43 3.1.1. Reinterpreting Pagel et al.’s frequency of use results ............................... 44 3.1.2. Swadesh list comparison of Latin and Spanish......................................... 45 3.1.3. Comparing two sets of frequencies from Modern Spanish ....................... 46 3.1.4. Genre comparison .................................................................................... 48 3.2. Full list results ........................................................................................................ 50 3.2.1. Full list comparison of Latin and Spanish ................................................. 51 3.2.2. Part of speech comparison ....................................................................... 52 3.2.3. Semantic category comparison ................................................................. 53 3.3. Discussion .............................................................................................................. 56 Chapter 4. Frequency of use and Lexical Change.................................................. 58 4.1. Relationship between frequency of use and lexical change ................................... 59 4.1.1. Frequency of use as a predictor variable