Observing and simulating changes in the Germanic past tense system

The Germanic languages maintain two general strategies to form the finite past tense of a verb. The first and oldest, named the strong inflection, is based on a vowel alternation, as in English sing-sang, while the second and youngest, contrastively called the weak inflection, employs a dental suffix, e.g. the English -ed in kick-kicked (Moonen 1706; Grimm 1819). The competition between both has been going on for thousands of years, and although the precise developments still remain rather unclear, the long-term trend is undeniably one of strong decline and weak ascension (Bailey 1997; Carroll, Svare and Salmons 2012; Van de Velde et al. 2017). Our goal is twofold. First, in order to get a clear picture of the exact facts, a large-scale empirical study on Dutch has been set up. Second, to enable us to test what may be the causes underlying these observations, we designed an agent-based computer simulation (Gilbert 2008; Steels 2011). In earlier proposals, it is often assumed that the strong inflection is stripped of all regularity and equated with ‘irregular inflection’, while the weak inflection is presented as ‘regular inflection’ (Ball 1968: 164; Bailey 1997: 17; Cuskley et al. 2014; Colaiori et al. 2015; Pijpops and Beuls 2015). We will claim (i) that this assumption is empirically questionable (see also e.g. Knooihuizen and Strik 2014; Fertig in prep.), and (ii) that it is not strictly required to explain the facts. This last point follows from the results of the simulation, where the strong inflection was assumed to be regular, yet developments akin to those observed in reality could still be shown to emerge.status: publishe