Are Languages like Atoms? On Modelling Language Spread as a Physicist

Q1 Arts and Humanities

Glottotheory Pub Date : 2018-06-01 DOI:10.1515/GLOT-2018-0005

Katharina Prochazka, G. Vogl

引用次数: 4

Abstract

Abstract In physics, the spread of particles such as atoms is called diffusion. The same term is employed in linguistics to describe the spread of language features or languages as a whole. In this paper, we investigate how models for physical diffusion can be transferred to linguistics to study language spread. We review the different ways of describing physical diffusion and then look at two types of models to study language spread. By examining the differences and similarities between speakers, languages and atoms, we show that it is important to be clear about what is being modelled: languages or speakers, as these are quite different but cannot be completely separated—languages cannot exist without speakers and vice versa.

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语言像原子吗?论模拟语言作为物理学家的传播

摘要在物理学中，原子等粒子的扩散称为扩散。语言学中使用同一术语来描述语言特征或语言整体的传播。在本文中，我们研究了如何将物理扩散模型转移到语言学中来研究语言传播。我们回顾了描述物理扩散的不同方式，然后研究了两种类型的语言传播模型。通过研究说话者、语言和原子之间的差异和相似性，我们表明，重要的是要清楚所建模的是什么：语言或说话者，因为它们非常不同，但不能完全分离——没有说话者，语言就不可能存在，反之亦然。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Glottotheory Arts and Humanities-History

CiteScore

0.70

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： The foci of Glottotheory are: observations and descriptions of all aspects of language and text phenomena including the areas of psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, pragmatics, etc. on all levels of linguistic analysis, applications of methods, models or findings from quantitative linguistics concerning problems of natural language processing, language teaching, documentation and information retrieval, methodological problems of linguistic measurement, model construction, sampling and test theory, epistemological issues such as explanation of language and text phenomena, contributions to theory construction, systems theory, philosophy of science. The journal considers itself as platform for a dialogue between quantitative and qualitative linguistics.