Memetic Epidemiology: A Mathematical Model for Tracking the Spread of Linguistic Features across Western Europe (Doctoral Dissertation Approved 2023)

Committee Members: Juliette Blevins, John McWhorter, Kyle Gorman, William Haddican, Nikolaus Ritt

Abstract: The goal of this dissertation is to introduce a powerful new method for demonstrating the role of contact in potential cases of linguistic contact spread, Memetic Epidemiology, that can facilitate extensive future research. This dissertation introduces and demonstrates the use of this method on examples from Western and Central Europe.

Part I begins by providing theoretical background for Memetic Epidemiology using understandings, including Memetics, and Evolutionary Phonology and its extensions. Part I proceeds to lay out the objective of Memetic Epidemiology: to provide a new means of demonstrating that contact influenced the rise of linguistic features in certain languages during the course of history. Part I concludes by explaining the details of how Memetic Epidemiology works, including the philosophical understandings and mathematical models upon which the method is built.

Part II presents three examples of Memetic Epidemiology in use. In accordance with the principles of Memetic Epidemiology, each of the three studies tracks the apparent spread of a specific linguistic pattern through time and across Western and Central Europe in order to accomplish the fundamental goal of the method: to establish that the apparent spread was, in fact, a contact-influenced spread phenomenon (the theoretical considerations in Part I and the mathematical calculations in the Appendix support the pursuit of this objective). The linguistic patterns tracked are contrastive front rounded vowels, the productive plural “-s” suffix, and (as an attempt at testing the limits of the method) the use of a sentence construction that contains an overt referential subject pronoun that offers no sense of contrastiveness.

Part III begins by assessing the method of Memetic Epidemiology and discussing how it can be used, based on the information in Parts I and II. It is found that Memetic Epidemiology offers a means of demonstrating that contact influenced linguistic changes in history and that Memetic Epidemiology is compatible with both the Comparative Method and existing contact models. Part III concludes with a brief discussion of the potential future of Memetic Epidemiology.

An Appendix presents precise mathematical calculations that support the studies in Part II. These calculations follow a model presented in Part I.

The Rise of Front Rounded Vowels in Western and Central Europe: Toward Linguistic Epidemiology (Qualifying Paper Approved 2020)

Committee Members: Juliette Blevins, Kyle Gorman, William Haddican

Abstract: Following a memetic approach to language evolution, this paper investigates the observed rise and spread of contrastive front rounded vowels in Western and Central Europe between 500 CE and the present. Contrastive front rounded vowels are typologically uncommon among the world’s languages but are widespread across Western and Central Europe. Such vowels first appeared in the Western-to-Central-Europe region in the area around the North Sea around 500 CE and, by roughly 1250 CE, had developed in languages across Western and Central Europe north of the Pyrenees and the Alps and east of the Irish Sea. The period between 1250 CE and the present saw further expansion. This patterned rise of an uncommon phonological feature suggests an areal spread. This paper chronicles this spread in detail over the period from 500 to 1250 CE and discusses the developments that have occurred since 1250 CE. This chronicling is intended to illustrate a new approach to historical and contact linguistics: one based on epidemiology.

This paper is organized into four parts. In Part I, reasons to suspect a contact spread phenomenon as the source of contrastive frond rounded vowels in Western and Central Europe are established and the memetic epidemiological approach to contact linguistics that this paper is intended to support is explained. Part II tracks the spread of front rounded vowels in Western and Central Europe over the period from 500 to 1250 CE using maps and then extends to the present with a further map. Part III discusses a hypothesis for a Pre-North Sea contact source of contrastive front rounded vowels in Western and Central Europe. And Part IV both provides an overarching interpretation of the data presented in Parts I-III and proposes directions for further research.

The Development of Celtic Vowels in Old English (Qualifying Paper Approved 2019)

Supervisors: Juliette Blevins, William Haddican

Abstract: This paper contributes to the debate over the Celtic Hypothesis by illustrating a set of parallels between the contrastive monophthongs that developed during the transition from Proto-West Germanic to Old English and monophthongs already existing in the British Celtic language that English evolved alongside. First, a basic statement of purpose is presented. Second, an overview of the Celtic Hypothesis debate is provided for context. Third, the population dynamics in and around Anglo-Saxon Britain are described, as they appear in the light of recent findings from the fields of archaeology and genetics. Fourth, contact phenomena relevant to diachronic phonological change are introduced as context for the linguistic observations made in the remainder of the paper. Fifth, the monophthongal systems of Brythonic, Proto-West Germanic, and Old English are presented, and four parallels between the place-rounding categories innovated in Old English and those already existing in Brythonic but not Proto-West Germanic are examined. In the sixth and final section, a brief summary of the observations made in the fifth section and a preliminary exploration of the potential significance of those observations to the larger field of diachronic Germanic linguistics are offered.

The Individual Linguistic Repertoire as the Product of a Contact Environment (Written: 2019)

Abstract: According to the theory of translanguaging, any speaker of human language is equipped with a linguistic repertoire, composed of numerous linguistic features, from which they draw the building blocks of any utterance they generate. The linguistic features commanded by a speaker have been acquired by that speaker from exposure to the language of other speakers. By this model, linguistic features function as cultural replicators that propagate from speaker to speaker, or what Richard Dawkins calls “memes.” Speakers with varying repertoires thus contribute to the features present in each other’s repertoires as long as they are in substantial linguistic contact. In light of this influence that speakers in contact situations have on each other’s feature repertoire formation, the repertoire of an individual speaker raised in an environment of exceptionally extensive linguistic contact among numerous and diverse dialects would be expected to contain features from across those dialects.

New York City is an environment of exceptionally extensive and diverse contact. This paper examines data gathered from a New York City speaker and searches for distinctive feature parallels in dialects known to be present during the upbringing of the speaker, with the goals of shedding light on the nature of repertoire formation in situations where many features are available for a speaker to acquire, and of testing the hypothesis that a speaker from a high-contact environment should possess a repertoire containing features from across the dialects present in their environment and of thereby determining whether the repertoire of an individual, as opposed to data from across a collection of speakers, can serve as a useful tool in generating a portrait of a contact situation.