Sociocultural Influences on Grammatical Innovation in Multilingual Communities

General Information

This study explores the quantifiable relationship between sociocultural factors and grammatical innovations in multilingual communities, focusing on how contact-induced changes shape linguistic typology. While much of the existing research emphasizes qualitative analysis, this study adopts a quantitative approach to measure and model the dynamics of grammatical change. Using linguistic corpora, sociolinguistic surveys, and computational simulations, the research examines how variables such as multilingualism prevalence, social network density, and community size influence the frequency and trajectory of grammatical innovations.

Background Information

The research builds on foundational work in contact linguistics and grammatical innovation, particularly focusing on:

• Contact-induced linguistic changes in multilingual settings
• Role of social structures in shaping grammatical shifts
• Relationship between community characteristics and linguistic evolution
• Impact of multilingualism on syntactic innovation

Research Question and Hypotheses

Research Question

How do quantifiable sociocultural factors (multilingualism prevalence, social network density, community size) influence the rate and pattern of grammatical innovations in multilingual communities?

Hypotheses

1. Higher multilingualism prevalence correlates with increased grammatical innovations
2. Denser social networks accelerate the adoption of new grammatical patterns
3. Smaller communities experience faster rates of grammatical change due to tighter social bonds

Method

Data Collection

• Project Gutenberg corpus analysis
• Computational simulations

Data Processing

1. Text cleaning and standardization
2. Sentence and word-level tokenization
3. Lemmatization for cross-linguistic comparison
4. Dependency parsing for syntactic analysis
5. Metadata annotation
6. Stopword management

Analysis Framework

• Statistical modeling of sociocultural variables
• Computational simulation of language contact
• Cross-linguistic comparison of grammatical patterns
• Validation through case studies

References

• Bakker, P. and R. A. Papen (2017)
• Dryer, M. S. (2013)
• Rosillo-Rodes, P., M. San Miguel, and D. Sánchez (2023)
• Schroeder, D. and P. Schmidt (2016)
• Shah, S. and C. Zimmer (2023)