Language Dynamics and Change最新文献_第5页

Prehistoric languages and human self-domestication 史前语言与人类自我驯化

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Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2018-12-10 DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/v6m2b

A. Benítez‐Burraco

引用次数: 6

Modeling change in contact settings 联系人设置中的建模更改

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Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2018-11-16 DOI: 10.1163/22105832-00802006

Katia Chirkova, T. Gong

{"title":"Modeling change in contact settings","authors":"Katia Chirkova, T. Gong","doi":"10.1163/22105832-00802006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00802006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Convergence is an oft-used notion in contact linguistics and historical linguistics. Yet it is problematic as an explanatory account for the changes it represents. In this study, we model one specific case of convergence (Duoxu, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language with 9 remaining speakers) to contribute to a more systematic understanding of the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. The goals are (1) to address the role of some linguistic and social factors assumed to have an effect on the process of convergence, and (2) to test the following explanations of empirical observations related to phonological convergence: (a) the loss of phonological segments in a language that has undergone convergence is correlated with the relative frequency and markedness of these segments in the combined bilingual repertoire, and (b) widespread bilingualism is a prerequisite for convergence. The results of our agent-based simulation affirm the importance of frequency and markedness of phonological segments in the process of convergence. At the same time, they suggest that the explanation related to widespread bilingualism may not be valid. Our study suggests computer simulations as a promising tool for investigation of complex cases of language change in contact settings.","PeriodicalId":43113,"journal":{"name":"Language Dynamics and Change","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/22105832-00802006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43197181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 2

Linguistic diversification as a long-term effect of asymmetric priming 非对称启动效应对语言多样化的长期影响

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Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2018-10-01 DOI: 10.1163/22105832-00802002

Andreas Baumann, Lotte Sommerer

引用次数: 3

Testing an agent-based model of language choice on sociolinguistic survey data 基于社会语言学调查数据的语言选择模型测试

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Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2018-10-01 DOI: 10.1163/22105832-00802004

Andres Karjus, Martin Ehala

引用次数: 8

A new approach to concept basicness and stability as a window to the robustness of concept list rankings 概念基本性和稳定性的新方法作为概念列表排名稳健性的窗口

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Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2018-10-01 DOI: 10.1163/22105832-00802001

Johannes Dellert, Armin Buch

{"title":"A new approach to concept basicness and stability as a window to the robustness of concept list rankings","authors":"Johannes Dellert, Armin Buch","doi":"10.1163/22105832-00802001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00802001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Based on a recently published large-scale lexicostatistical database, we rank 1,016 concepts by their suitability for inclusion in Swadesh-style lists of basic stable concepts. For this, we define separate measures of basicness and stability. Basicness in the sense of morphological simplicity is measured based on information content, a generalization of word length which corrects for distorting effects of phoneme inventory sizes, phonotactics and non-stem morphemes in dictionary forms. Stability against replacement by semantic shift or borrowing is measured by sampling independent language pairs, and correlating the distances between the forms for the concept with the overall language distances. In order to determine the relative importance of basicness and stability, we optimize our combination of the two partial measures towards similarity with existing lists. A comparison with and among existing rankings suggests that concept rankings are highly data-dependent and therefore less well-grounded than previously assumed. To explore this issue, we evaluate the robustness of our ranking against language pair resampling, allowing us to assess how much volatility can be expected, and showing that only about half of the concepts on a list based on our ranking can safely be assumed to belong on the list independently of the data.","PeriodicalId":43113,"journal":{"name":"Language Dynamics and Change","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/22105832-00802001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44656488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 14

Using ancestral state reconstruction methods for onomasiological reconstruction in multilingual word lists 基于祖先状态重构方法的多语词表拟声重建

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Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2018-06-22 DOI: 10.1163/22105832-00801002

Gerhard Jäger, Johann-Mattis List

{"title":"Using ancestral state reconstruction methods for onomasiological reconstruction in multilingual word lists","authors":"Gerhard Jäger, Johann-Mattis List","doi":"10.1163/22105832-00801002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00801002","url":null,"abstract":"Current efforts in computational historical linguistics are predominantly concerned with phylogenetic inference. Methods for ancestral state reconstruction have only been applied sporadically. In contrast to phylogenetic algorithms, automatic reconstruction methods presuppose phylogenetic information in order to explain what has evolved when and where. Here we report a pilot study exploring how well automatic methods for ancestral state reconstruction perform in the task of onomasiological reconstruction in multilingual word lists, where algorithms are used to infer how the words evolved along a given phylogeny, and reconstruct which cognate classes were used to express a given meaning in the ancestral languages. Comparing three different methods, Maximum Parsimony, Minimal Lateral Networks, and Maximum Likelihood on three different test sets (Indo-European, Austronesian, Chinese) using binary and multi-state coding of the data as well as single and sampled phylogenies, we find that Maximum Likelihood largely outperforms the other methods. At the same time, however, the general performance was disappointingly low, ranging between 0.66 (Chinese) and 0.79 (Austronesian) for the F-Scores. A closer linguistic evaluation of the reconstructions proposed by the best method and the reconstructions given in the gold standards revealed that the majority of the cases where the algorithms failed can be attributed to problems of independent semantic shift (homoplasy), to morphological processes in lexical change, and to wrong reconstructions in the independently created test sets that we employed.","PeriodicalId":43113,"journal":{"name":"Language Dynamics and Change","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/22105832-00801002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47493958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 13

Making genealogical language classifications available for phylogenetic analysis 使系谱语言分类可用于系统发育分析

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Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2018-06-22 DOI: 10.1163/22105832-00801001

D. Dediu

{"title":"Making genealogical language classifications available for phylogenetic analysis","authors":"D. Dediu","doi":"10.1163/22105832-00801001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00801001","url":null,"abstract":"One of the best-known types of non-independence between languages is caused by genealogical relationships due to descent from a common ancestor. These can be represented by (more or less resolved and controversial) language family trees. In theory, one can argue that language families should be built through the strict application of the comparative method of historical linguistics, but in practice this is not always the case, and there are several proposed classifications of languages into language families, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. A major stumbling block shared by most of them is that they are relatively difficult to use with computational methods, and in particular with phylogenetics. This is due to their lack of standardization, coupled with the general non-availability of branch length information, which encapsulates the amount of evolution taking place on the family tree. In this paper I introduce a method (and its implementation in R) that converts the language classifications provided by four widely-used databases (Ethnologue, WALS, AUTOTYP and Glottolog) into the de facto Newick standard generally used in phylogenetics, aligns the four most used conventions for unique identifiers of linguistic entities (ISO 639-3, WALS, AUTOTYP and Glottocode), and adds branch length information from a variety of sources (the tree’s own topology, an externally given numeric constant, or a distance matrix). The R scripts, input data and resulting Newick trees are available under liberal open-source licenses in a GitHub repository (https://github.com/ddediu/lgfam-newick), to encourage and promote the use of phylogenetic methods to investigate linguistic diversity and its temporal dynamics.","PeriodicalId":43113,"journal":{"name":"Language Dynamics and Change","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/22105832-00801001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47214855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 7

The effect of dictionary omissions on phylogenies computationally inferred from lexical data 从词汇数据计算推断的词典遗漏对系统发育的影响

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Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2018-06-22 DOI: 10.1163/22105832-00801007

I. Yanovich

{"title":"The effect of dictionary omissions on phylogenies computationally inferred from lexical data","authors":"I. Yanovich","doi":"10.1163/22105832-00801007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00801007","url":null,"abstract":"Lexical datasets used for computational phylogenetic inference suffer a unique type of data error. Some words actually present in a language may be absent from the dataset at no fault of its curators: especially for lesser-studied languages, a word may be missing from all available sources such as dictionaries. It is thus important to be able to (i) check how robust one’s inferences are to dictionary omission errors, and (ii) incorporate the knowledge that such errors may be present into one’s inference. I introduce two simple techniques that work towards those goals, and study the possible effects of dictionary omission errors in two real-life case studies on the Lezgian and Uralic datasets from Kassian (2015) and Syrjänen et al. (2013), respectively. The effects of dictionary omission turn out to be moderate (Lezgian) to negligible (Uralic), and certainly far less significant than the possible effects of modeling choices, including priors, on the inferred phylogeny, as demonstrated in the Uralic case study. Assessing the possible effects of dictionary omissions is advisable, but severe problems are unlikely. Collecting significantly larger lexical datasets, in order to overcome sensitivity to priors, is likely more important than expending resources on verifying data against dictionary omissions.","PeriodicalId":43113,"journal":{"name":"Language Dynamics and Change","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2018-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/22105832-00801007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45453654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 1

Halfway up the mountain 在半山腰

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Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2018-06-22 DOI: 10.1163/22105832-00801006

J. Heath

引用次数: 0

Armenian prosody in typology and diachrony 亚美尼亚韵律的类型学和历时性

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Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2018-06-22 DOI: 10.1163/22105832-00801005

J. DeLisi

引用次数: 5