Related papers: Fading of collective attention shapes the evolutio…
Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish…
Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the `descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages,…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may…
Emergence is a fascinating property of large language models and neural networks more broadly: as models scale and train for longer, they sometimes develop new abilities in sudden ways. Despite initial studies, we still lack a comprehensive…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…
Word evolution refers to the changing meanings and associations of words throughout time, as a byproduct of human language evolution. By studying word evolution, we can infer social trends and language constructs over different periods of…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
Increasing evidence demonstrates that in many places language coexistence has become ubiquitous and essential for supporting language and cultural diversity and associated with its financial and economic benefits. The competitive evolution…
Human language emerged abruptly. Diverse body forms evolved suddenly. Seed-bearing plants spread rapidly. How do complex evolutionary innovations arise so quickly? Resolving alternative claims remains difficult. The great events of the past…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
People exhibit a tendency to generalize a novel noun to the basic-level in a hierarchical taxonomy -- a cognitively salient category such as "dog" -- with the degree of generalization depending on the number and type of exemplars. Recently,…
The cognitive reality of irregular morphological patterns has been debated for decades: do speakers extend them to novel forms, or are they lexical artifacts? A neural network trained on distributional input offers a learnability test: if…
One proposed mechanism of language change concerns the role played by second-language (L2) learners in situations of language contact. If sufficiently many L2 speakers are present in a speech community in relation to the number of…
An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…