Stochastic Grammar Competition - Syntactic Changes in Early English

In my dissertation, I am concerned with specific questions regarding language change: (1) Why do grammatical changes proceed at the same rate in all contexts? (2) How do conditioned rules emerge? I use examples from the history of English and a quantitative methodology for my research, i.e. large-scale data collections with parsed corpora and their statistical evaluation. Ultimately, the aim of the quantitative work is to model linguistic changes formally.