Related papers: Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical co…
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…
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…
Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…
One of the most intriguing features of language is its constant change, with ongoing shifts in how meaning is expressed. Despite decades of research, the factors that determine how and why meanings evolve remain only partly understood.…
n this paper, we attempt to explain the emergence of the linguistic diversity that exists across the consonant inventories of some of the major language families of the world through a complex network based growth model. There is only a…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major…
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,…
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…
In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…
Language evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that…
Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression…
Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of…
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…
It has been claimed that within a language, morphologically irregular words are more likely to be phonotactically simple and morphologically regular words are more likely to be phonotactically complex. This inverse correlation has been…
Language similarities can be caused by genetic relatedness, areal contact, universality, or chance. Colexification, i.e. a type of similarity where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings, is underexplored. In our work, we…
We use Monte Carlo simulations and assumptions from evolutionary game theory in order to study the evolution of words and the population dynamics of a system comprising two interacting species which initially speak two different languages.…
Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task. Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional -- i.e., express meaning by…
Speech sounds of the languages all over the world show remarkable patterns of cooccurrence. In this work, we attempt to automatically capture the patterns of cooccurrence of the consonants across languages and at the same time figure out…
The sound inventories of the world's languages self-organize themselves giving rise to similar cross-linguistic patterns. In this work we attempt to capture this phenomenon of self-organization, which shapes the structure of the consonant…