Related papers: Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical co…
Synonyms and homonyms appear in all natural languages. We analyse their evolution within the framework of the signaling game. Agents in our model use reinforcement learning, where probabilities of selection of a communicated word or of its…
Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to…
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…
Language has been a dynamic system and word meanings always have been changed over times. Every time a novel concept or sense is introduced, we need to assign it a word to express it. Also, some changes have happened because the result of a…
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…
The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We…
We study the self-organization of the consonant inventories through a complex network approach. We observe that the distribution of occurrence as well as cooccurrence of the consonants across languages follow a power-law behavior. The…
What makes some types of languages more probable than others? For instance, we know that almost all spoken languages contain the vowel phoneme /i/; why should that be? The field of linguistic typology seeks to answer these questions and,…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
Many natural languages assign grammatical gender also to inanimate nouns in the language. In such languages, words that relate to the gender-marked nouns are inflected to agree with the noun's gender. We show that this affects the word…
Significant advances have been made in artificial systems by using biological systems as a guide. However, there is often little interaction between computational models for emergent communication and biological models of the emergence of…
As an integral part of our culture and way of life, language is intricately related to migrations of people. To understand whether and how migration shapes language formation processes we examine the dynamics of the naming game with…
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…
Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross-linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
We find generating functions for the number of words avoiding certain patterns or sets of patterns on at most 2 distinct letters and determine which of them are equally avoided. We also find the exact number of words avoiding certain…
Large language models have shown unprecedented abilities in generating linguistically coherent and syntactically correct natural language output. However, they often return incorrect and inconsistent answers to input questions. Due to the…
A computational model of the construction of word meaning through exposure to texts is built in order to simulate the effects of co-occurrence values on word semantic similarities, paragraph by paragraph. Semantic similarity is here viewed…