Model-based Measuring of Syntactic Change

Abstract

A new method for quantitative representation of syntactic change is introduced. The method is model-based in the sense that a formal grammatical model is used to describe stages of syntactic change. Then, by measuring some relevant features of the model, syntactic change is represented as a sequence of numerical values. This can be used for establishing the rate of syntactic change and for further investigations and comparisons of various syntactic changes. © 1995, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.