Related papers: Investigating Lexical Change through Cross-Linguis…
Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive rule systems and statistical learning to explain our ability to learn new concepts from just a few examples. The aim of most…
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…
The categorical compositional distributional (DisCoCat) model of meaning developed by Coecke et al. (2010) has been successful in modeling various aspects of meaning. However, it fails to model the fact that language can change. We give an…
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…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
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…
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…
Lexical Semantic Change is the study of how the meaning of words evolves through time. Another related question is whether and how lexical relations over pairs of words, such as synonymy, change over time. There are currently two competing,…
In comparative linguistics, colexification refers to the phenomenon of a lexical form conveying two or more distinct meanings. Existing work on colexification patterns relies on annotated word lists, limiting scalability and usefulness in…
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…
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…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
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…
Are the predictions of humans and language models affected by similar things? Research suggests that while comprehending language, humans make predictions about upcoming words, with more predictable words being processed more easily.…
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…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
Languages disfavor word forms containing sequences of similar or identical consonants, due to the biomechanical and cognitive difficulties posed by patterns of this sort. However, the specific evolutionary processes responsible for this…
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…
Word similarities affect language acquisition and use in a multi-relational way barely accounted for in the literature. We propose a multiplex network representation of this mental lexicon of word similarities as a natural framework for…
Do speakers of different languages talk differently about what they see? Behavioural and cognitive studies report cultural effects on perception; however, these are mostly limited in scope and hard to replicate. In this work, we conduct the…