Explaining language change: A three step process

take place because of some misinterpretation of the information
the children receive during their language acquisition. It is our
headache as linguists to figure out both how and why this can
happen. The question is when can we assume that an
interpretation is in some way natural? The children misinterpret
the information, and they assume that their interpretation is
right and do not change it, but why is that? The answer to this
question might be concealed in the ‘small changes’ of the
language (see Guðmundsdóttir 2000): A sound change, a
change in word inflection or a syntactical change may appear to
reflect great mistakes because of the great difference between
the old and the new forms. However, the change is perhaps not
so great if we take a closer look, perhaps it was only one sound
feature that disappeared or a syntactical rule that got expanded,
etc. Then, it becomes easier to understand the so-called
mistakes, but at the same time we still have to look for an
explanation for the reason why this happened. There must have
been something in the information (output) the children
received that led to their misinterpretation. Our search for the
explanation is at least twofold: it takes to the child itself and its
language environment, that is, the language that the children
hear during their language acquisition.
One important factor in this process is the assumption that
languages are structure dependent (Chomsky 1972). This means
that knowledge of language depends on the structural
relationship in the sentence rather than on the sequence of
items. This fact has a number of implications for language
acquisition: Children must be able to find the units in their
particular language and detect which units are structurally
dependent on what other units in that language. This in turn
involves recognizing the hierarchical structure of the language
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