The emotions we speak

Predicting language change has been an ambitious yet largely unsuccessful task in linguistics. Among the possible reasons for this is the actuation problem (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog 1968), namely our inability to determine why a change in a particular structural feature takes place in a given language at a given time, rather than in a different language or at a different time, and the central role of social factors, seen as inherently unpredictable (Thomason & Kaufmann 1988). Furthermore, while language change can be observed in historic dimensions, we can only hypothesize about the social or psychological dimension of language use in the past, since language change is a long-term phenomenon and individual human linguistic actions are short- term phenomena. Our project aims to deliver a strongly predictive theory of language change by introducing a novel, highly interdisciplinary approach in which language attitudes to linguistic material are measured using sociolinguistic and neurolinguistic methodology. The premise is that the role of social factors in language change is key, and the hypothesis is that, among social factors, emotional attitudes to language play a decisive role. We hypothesize that (conscious and subconscious) emotional attitudes towards linguistic elements will impose pressure on the linguistic system, leading to predictable language change. The crucial aspect of the approach consists in analyzing experimental stimuli within the framework of generative linguistics, which is a theory-driven framework with great predictive ability, in order to identify typologically significant parameters of variation predicted to be subject to speakers strong emotional attitudes, given socio-historic and political circumstances and language contact situations that have shaped them. The project will test the main hypothesis by focusing on a rare sociolinguistic phenomenon, termed linguistic conversion (following Bilaniuk 2020) that has been unfolding in Ukraine as a reaction to Russias war of aggression wherein bilingual speakers of Ukrainian and Russian and those for whom Russian is the primary language of communication give up the language entirely and make a categorical switch to Ukrainian. This highly unusual sociolinguistic situation presents a unique opportunity for testing the proposed theory of emotionally driven language change precisely because the observed strength of emotional attitudes to language should make it possible to study the relevant processes as they are unfolding at a level of detail hardly available for observation before.