相关论文: Modelling the Diachronic Emergence of Phoneme Freq…
We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency distributions closely follow the order statistics of a…
Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
The effects of demographic stochasticity in the long term behaviour of endemic infectious diseases have been considered for long as a necessary addition to an underlying deterministic theory. The latter would explain the regular behaviour…
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
We present a method of finding and analyzing shifts in grammatical relations found in diachronic corpora. Inspired by the econometric technique of measuring return and volatility instead of relative frequencies, we propose them as a way to…
Many languages' inflectional morphological systems are replete with irregulars, i.e., words that do not seem to follow standard inflectional rules. In this work, we quantitatively investigate the conditions under which irregulars can…
The statistical over-representation of phonological features in the basic vocabulary of languages is often interpreted as reflecting potentially universal sound symbolic patterns. However, most of those results have not been tested…
The historical and geographical spread from older to more modern languages has long been studied by examining textual changes and in terms of changes in phonetic transcriptions. However, it is more difficult to analyze language change from…
Quantifying the similarity between symbolic sequences is a traditional problem in Information Theory which requires comparing the frequencies of symbols in different sequences. In numerous modern applications, ranging from DNA over music to…
In spoken languages, speakers divide up the space of phonetic possibilities into different regions, corresponding to different phonemes. We consider a simple exemplar model of how this division of phonetic space varies over time among a…
We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical…
When a collection of phenotypically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources, with competition being strongest amongst the most similar, the population can evolve into tightly localised clusters. This process can be…
In this paper, a new statistic feature of the discrete short-time amplitude spectrum is discovered by experiments for the signals of unvoiced pronunciation. For the random-varying short-time spectrum, this feature reveals the relationship…
Newberry et al. (Detecting evolutionary forces in language change, Nature 551, 2017) tackle an important but difficult problem in linguistics, the testing of selective theories of language change against a null model of drift. Having…
It has been observed that an interesting class of non-Gaussian stationary processes is obtained when in the harmonics of a signal with random amplitudes and phases, frequencies can also vary randomly. In the resulting models, the…
Genomic evolution can be viewed as string-editing processes driven by mutations. An understanding of the statistical properties resulting from these mutation processes is of value in a variety of tasks related to biological sequence data,…
Models of population growth and extinction are an increasingly popular subject of study. However, consequences of stochasticity and noise in shaping distributions and outcomes are not sufficiently explored. Here we consider a distributed…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
Earlier we showed that the fine structure of the spectrum of amplitude variations in the results of measurements of the processes of different nature (in other words, the fine structure of the dispersion of results or the pattern of the…