37.3472, Confs: Workshop at ICHL28: Historical (Morpho)Syntax from a Psycholinguistic Perspective (Iceland)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3472. Thu 22 Oct 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3472, Confs: Workshop at ICHL28: Historical (Morpho)Syntax from a Psycholinguistic Perspective (Iceland)

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Date: 20-Oct-2026
From: Sophia Voigtmann [sophia.voigtmann at uni-bamberg.de]
Subject: Workshop at ICHL28: Historical (Morpho)Syntax from a Psycholinguistic Perspective


Workshop at ICHL28: Historical (Morpho)Syntax from a Psycholinguistic
Perspective
Short Title: ICHL28
Theme: Historical (Morpho)Syntax from a Psycholinguistic Perspective

Date: 26-Jul-2027 - 30-Jul-2027
Location: Reykjavík, Iceland
Meeting URL: https://ichl28.hi.is/

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Morphology;
Psycholinguistics; Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 01-Dec-2026

Organizers (both equally involved)
Sophia Voigtmann (sophia.voigtmann at uni-bamberg.de), Bamberg University
Joanna H. Wall (joanna.wall at meertens.knaw.nl), Meertens Institute &
Utrecht University
Psycholinguistic concepts have long been given a central role in
explanatory accounts of language change across different theoretical
frameworks. Whilst the obvious impossibility of experimental research
previously posed a challenge, developments in large corpora,
artificial language research and computational methods in recent years
have significantly increased the possibilities for investigating
language change, historical language data and the variation therein
through the lens of psycholinguistics (Hundt et al. 2017, 2025). This
research and the workshop address questions like:
1.      How can psycholinguistic models of production and/or
comprehension account for patterns of historical variation?
2.      To what extent can psycholinguistic concepts explain the
emergence, diffusion, and loss of (morpho)syntactic constructions?
3.      How can psycholinguistic approaches complement or challenge
traditional functional, formal, and usage-based explanations of
historical syntax?
4.      What methodological problems arise when psycholinguistic
hypotheses are tested against historical data, and how can they be
addressed?
To shed more light on these questions, the workshop aims to bring
together linguists working on historical (morpho)syntax from all
theoretical backgrounds who use psycholinguistic approaches on their
data. Its broader goals are, thus, to discuss the methodological
challenges in psycho-historical linguistics (term used by Winters
2017) and explore how the concepts and methods from psycholinguistics
can contribute to the understanding of historical syntactic variation
and diachronic change.
As already noted, psycho-historical linguistic research has been
growing in recent years. Among others, priming (Bock 1986) has been
invoked to account for “the development from spatial to temporal
expressions” (Jäger and Rosenbach 2008, 91) and the emergence of
-ing-complements in English (Meisezahl and Walkden 2026). Furthermore,
frequency effects (e.g. Jescheniak and Levelt 1994; Ellis 2002) have
been used to investigate morphosyntactic language change such as word
class changes (De Smet 2016). The preceding concepts also provide a
link to theories of language acquisition. The Tolerance and the
Sufficiency Principle (Yang 2016), a mathematical model of language
acquisition, has, for example, modelled valency changes in Middle
English psych verbs (Trips and Rainsford 2022; Trips et al. 2026).
Furthermore, Hundt et al. (2025) emphasise the importance of, among
others, salience (Ariel 2001), analogy (Gentner 2003), prediction
(also Pickering and Gambi 2018) and ambiguity (Tuggy 1993) for
research in language history. There is also a growing research
interest in how the overarching concept of processing influences
historical variation and diachronic change of, for example, word order
change in German infinitival constructions (De Cesare et al. 2024).
Finally, the advent of large language models creates new possibilities
for the application information theory (Shannon 1948) and surprisal
(Hale 2001; Levy 2008), which calculate the information content of a
unit in a given context and have been strongly linked to processing
(e.g. Demberg and Keller 2008). These notions were, for instance,
applied to the change of OV to VO in English and Icelandic (Wallenberg
et al. 2021) and the variation of word order in the German middle
field (Voigtmann and Wall 2026), although their application to
historical data still presents challenges.
Taken together, these studies demonstrate the potential of
psycholinguistic approaches to historical syntax, an area that will
certainly grow in the future.
Abstracts:
Written in English
Maximum length (excluding references) 500 words
PDF format
Please clearly indicate that your abstract is for this workshop when
you submit it to EasyAbs:
https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/ICHL28/
References:
Ariel, Mira. 2001. ‘Accessibility Theory: An Overview’. In Human
Cognitive Processing, edited by Ted J. M. Sanders, Joost Schilperoord,
and Wilbert Spooren, vol. 8. John Benjamins.
Bock, J. Kathryn. 1986. ‘Syntactic Persistence in Language
Production’. Cognitive Psychology 18 (3): 355–87.
De Cesare, Ilaria, Sina Bosch, Claudia Felser, and Ulrike Demske.
2024. ‘Word Order Change in German Infinitival Complementation: The
Role of Processing Factors’. Diachronica 41 (5): 575–604.
De Smet, Hendrik. 2016. ‘How Gradual Change Progresses: The
Interaction between Convention and Innovation’. Language Variation and
Change 28 (1): 83–102.
Demberg, Vera, and Frank Keller. 2008. ‘Data from Eye-Tracking Corpora
as Evidence for Theories of Syntactic Processing Complexity’.
Cognition 109 (2): 193–210.
Ellis, Nick C. 2002. ‘Frequency Effects in Language Processing: A
Review with Implications for Theories of Implicit and Explicit
Language Acquisition’. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24 (2):
143–88.
Gentner, Dedre. 2003. ‘Why We’re So Smart’. In Language in Mind,
edited by Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow. MIT Press.
Hale, John. 2001. ‘A Probabilistic Earley Parser as a Psycholinguistic
Model’. Proceedings of the Second Meeting of the North American
Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Language
Technologies (USA), NAACL ’01, 1–8.
Hundt, Marianne, Sandra Mollin, and Simone E. Pfenninger, eds. 2017.
The Changing English Language: Psycholinguistic Perspectives.
Cambridge University Press.
Hundt, Marianne, Simone E. Pfenninger, and Sandra Mollin. 2025.
‘Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Language Change’. In The New
Cambridge History of the English Language, 1st edn, edited by Merja
Kytö and Erik Smitterberg. Cambridge University Press.
Jäger, Gerhard, and Anette Rosenbach. 2008. ‘Priming and
Unidirectional Language Change’. Theoretical Linguistics 34 (2):
85–113.
Jescheniak, Jörg D., and Willem J. M. Levelt. 1994. ‘Word Frequency
Effects in Speech Production: Retrieval of Syntactic Information and
of Phonological Form.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition 20 (4): 824–43.
Levy, Roger. 2008. ‘Expectation-Based Syntactic Comprehension’.
Cognition 106 (3): 1126– 77.
Meisezahl, Marc, and George Walkden. 2026. ‘The -Ing-Spiracy: The Role
of Priming in the
Rise of English -Ing-Complements’. DiGS27 Diachronic Generative
Syntax, Padua, Italy, June 18.
Pickering, Martin J., and Chiara Gambi. 2018. ‘Predicting While
Comprehending Language: A Theory and Review.’ Psychological Bulletin
144 (10): 1002–44.
Shannon, Claude E. 1948. ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’. The
Bell System Technical Journal 27 (3): 379–423.
Trips, Carola, and Thomas Rainsford. 2022. ‘Tolerating
Subject-Experiencers?’ Journal of Historical Syntax, October 14, 1–43.
Trips, Carola, Tara Struik, and Lena Kaltenbach. 2026. ‘Language
Contact and Language Change: Contact-Induced Structural Change in
Medieval England’. In International Encyclopedia of Language and
Linguistics. Elsevier.
Tuggy, David. 1993. ‘Ambiguity, Polysemy, and Vagueness’. Cognitive
Linguistics 4 (3): 273–90.
Voigtmann, Sophia, and Joanna Wall. 2026. ‘Double Object Order in
Historic German: A Unified Processing Perspective with New Data from
Pronominal Constructions’. Journal of Historical Syntax 10 (6): 1–66.
Wallenberg, Joel C., Rachael Bailes, Christine Cuskley, and Anton Karl
Ingason. 2021. ‘Smooth Signals and Syntactic Change’. Languages 6
(60).
Winters, Margaret E. 2017. ‘Psycho-Historical Linguistics: Its Context
and Potential’. English Language and Linguistics 21 (2): 413–21.
Yang, Charles D. 2016. The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How
Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language. The MIT Press.


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