Acting on actuation

Hendrik De Smet · Guglielmo Inglese · Malte Rosemeyer

2025年7月 · Conceptual Foundations of Language Science 第 10 本图书 · Language Science Press

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This volume presents a timely discussion on one of the most fundamental and yet elusive questions in historical linguistics: why do certain linguistic changes take place in some languages at specific times, but not in others, even under similar conditions? The actuation problem, first articulated by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968), remains a central puzzle in the study of language change, at the crossroads between language structure, cognitive processes, and social dynamics. While significant progress has been made in identifying pathways and constraints on change and in understanding the social embedding of linguistic variation, the ultimate challenge of predicting language change remains unresolved, raising the question of whether historical linguistics can ever be a predictive science. The main reason for skepticism is that the inherent complexity of language structure and use makes it extremely challenging to predict when and how a given change may occur. Even so, a reassessment of where the discipline stands with respect to its most central research question is in order.

Building on recent advances in variationist sociolinguistics, grammaticalization theory, and probabilistic modeling of language, the contributions in this volume offer fresh theoretical and methodological perspectives on the actuation problem, discussing the interplay between principles of language change, the role of bilingualism and language contact more generally, the distinction between innovation and propagation, and the role of sociocultural change. Research presented in this volume shows that there is indeed cause for hope, bringing at least a probabilistic answer to the actuation problem within closer reach.

作者简介

Hendrik De Smet is associate professor at the University of Leuven. His expertise is in the history of English, historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics. Through his publications he has documented various aspects of the history of English and has contributed to the understanding of the mechanisms that drive language change, including reanalysis, analogy, semantic change and competition. He has also compiled several corpora and made them available to the research community.

Guglielmo Inglese is associate professor at the University of Torino, where he teaches courses in general and historical linguistics. He obtained his PhD in 2019 at the University of Pavia and the monograph resulting from his dissertation, The Hittite Middle Voice. Synchrony, diachrony, typology, published by Brill, received the SLE Eugenio Coseriu Book Award in 2021. His main research interests include Indo-European and historical linguistics (with a particular focus on Hittite, Ancient Greek, and Latin) and linguistic typology.

Malte Rosemeyer is professor of Romance Philology and Hispanic Linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin. He obtained his PhD in 2013 at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg with the doctoral thesis “Auxiliary Selection in Spanish. Gradience, Gradualness, and Conservation” and his habilitation in 2020 with the habilitation thesis “Variation and Change in Ibero-Romance Wh-interrogatives”. His main research interests include grammatical variation and change in current and historical Romance languages, as well as methodological advances in quantitative corpus linguistics. He is currently principal investigator of the project "Experimental replication of historical reanalysis processes" (EXREAN), funded by the European Research Council.