An improved test of the constant rate hypothesis: Late Modern American English possessive have

Abstract

The Constant Rate Hypothesis (CRH) predicts that a linguistic innovation should spread at identical rates of change in all grammatical contexts in which it is used (Kroch 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1(3). 199-244). Weaknesses in previous tests of the CRH are identified. A new study is conducted that improves upon them. It utilizes a syntactic change in late Modern American English possessive have, which altered its realization in the grammar-theoretically related contexts negation, inversion, VP-adjunction and VP-ellipsis. Data sets are collected from the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2010. The corpus of historical American English: 400 million words, 1810-2009. http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/ (accessed 10 September 2016)) and analyzed with mixed-effects logistic regression models. The statistical analysis reveals that it is indeed plausible to assume that each of the contexts innovates the use of possessive have at the same speed. Implications of the findings for the CRH are discussed.