Related papers: On the Evolution of Word Order
The concepts used in IFOL have associated to them a list of sorted attributes, and the sorts are the intensional concepts as well. The requirement to extend the unsorted IFOL (Intensional FOL) to many-sorted IFOL is mainly based on the fact…
Selectional preference learning methods have usually focused on word-to-class relations, e.g., a verb selects as its subject a given nominal class. This papers extends previous statistical models to class-to-class preferences, and presents…
Human languages are rule governed, but almost invariably these rules have exceptions in the form of irregularities. Since rules in language are efficient and productive, the persistence of irregularity is an anomaly. How does irregularity…
We investigate certain word-construction games with variable turn orders. In these games, Alice and Bob take turns on choosing consecutive letters of a word of fixed length, with Alice winning if the result lies in a predetermined target…
As NLP tools become ubiquitous in today's technological landscape, they are increasingly applied to languages with a variety of typological structures. However, NLP research does not focus primarily on typological differences in its…
It is a well-known empirical phenomenon that natural axiomatic theories are pre-well-ordered by consistency strength. Without a precise mathematical definition of "natural," it is unclear how to study this phenomenon mathematically. We will…
Language sciences rely less and less on formal syntax as their base. The reason is probably its lack of psychological reality, knowingly avoided. Philosophers of science call for a paradigm shift in which explanations are by mechanisms, as…
I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying…
Human beings possess the most sophisticated computational machinery in the known universe. We can understand language of rich descriptive power, and communicate in the same environment with astonishing clarity. Two of the many contributors…
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…
This paper is based on our previous work on neural coding. It is a self-organized model supported by existing evidences. Firstly, we briefly introduce this model in this paper, and then we explain the neural mechanism of language and…
It is often useful to sort words into an order that reflects relations among their meanings as obtained by using a thesaurus. In this paper, we introduce a method of arranging words semantically by using several types of `{\sf is-a}'…
Programming languages are engineered languages that allow to instruct a machine and share algorithmic information; they have a great influence on the society since they underlie almost every information technology artefact, and they are at…
Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very robust as an experimental observation, but to date it escaped…
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…
The words of a language are randomly replaced in time by new ones, but it has long been known that words corresponding to some items (meanings) are less frequently replaced than others. Usually, the rate of replacement for a given item is…
Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, has been viewed as a manifestation of compression, i.e. the minimization of the length of forms -- a universal principle of natural communication.…
We develop a system that formally represents spatial semantics concepts within natural language descriptions of spatial arrangements. The system builds on a model of spatial semantics representation according to which words in a sentence…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…