SFB 1646

X01: Collective creativity in diachrony. The propagation of grammatical inventions in New High German

X01, located at the intersection between linguistics and economics, investigates the emergence and diffusion of creative language use on the collective level. The project focuses on linguistic innovations in New High German and combines established empirical methods from historical linguistics with methods from innovation management. Social networks and their dynamics, which are simulated by using agent-based models and afterwards contrasted with language usage data, are at the center of the analyses. We aim to test the plausibility of sociolinguistic assumptions about language change and to model language as a social innovation system.