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Previous versions of this paper were presented at the First Scottish-Dutch Workshop on Language Evolution: Formal Modeling meets Empirical Data, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; the Departmental Colloquium Series, Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico; the 3rd Workshop on Evolutionary Approaches to Culture, Cognition and Communication, Edinburgh, UK; the Workshop on Language Evolution: Computer Models for Empirical Data, Noordwijk, the Netherlands; the International Summer Atelier: Modeling Language Evolution with Computational Construction Grammar, Ettore Majorana Foundation and Center for Scientific Culture, Erice, Italy; and the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, Illinois. We thank members of the audiences for their comments; all responsibility for the final product remains with us. This research was partly supported by funding from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Blythe) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK) (grant GR/T11784; McKane); Blythe is an RCUK (Research Councils UK) Fellow.
In this paper, we use mathematical modeling to evaluate Trudgill's theory of new-dialect formation, as applied to the emergence of New Zealand English (Trudgill, 2004; see also Gordon, Campbell, Hay, Maclagan, Sudbury, & Trudgill, 2004; Trudgill, 1986; Trudgill et al., 2000). Our goals are twofold. The first is to investigate certain properties of the propagation of language change. Trudgill's theory of new-dialect formation for isolated speech communities has an interesting and theoretically controversial property, which Trudgill calls determinism. There is no role for social factors such as prestige or identity in the emergence of isolated new dialects such as New Zealand English. Instead, new-dialect formation is purely frequency-based, in terms of exposure to tokens of language use by the speakers with whom one interacts. That is, the primary or sole social factor involved in new-dialect formation is accommodation (Giles, 1973). Trudgill even questioned whether accommodation is "social" in the sense of behavior potentially under the control of human beings in social interaction. He argued that accommodation is universal (Trudgill, 1986:2), and more recently, he suggested that accommodation has an innate biological basis (Trudgill, 2004:28; 2008:252).
Trudgill's theory is related to usage-based theories of linguistic knowledge and language use (e.g., Bybee, 2001; Pierrehumbert, 2003) in that linguistic behavior is determined by language use in communicative interaction. Trudgill's deterministic theory...