Testing the robustness of laws of polysemy and brevity versus frequency

The pioneering research of G.K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. Here we focus on a couple of them: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. Here we evaluate the robustness of these laws in contexts where they have not been explored yet to our knowledge. The recovery of the laws again in new conditions provides support for the hypothesis that they originate from abstract mechanisms.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language

The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that have been studied less intensively: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. In a previous work, we tested the robustness of these Zipfian laws for English, roughly measuring word length in number of characters and distinguishing adult from child speech. In the present article, we extend our study to other languages (Dutch and Spanish) and introduce two additional measures of length: syllabic length and phonemic length. Our correlation analysis indicates that both the meaning-frequency law and the law of abbreviation hold overall in all the analyzed languages

The formal composition of puns in Shakespeare’s "Love’s Labour’s Lost": A corpus-based study

The present paper is a corpus-based study seeking to demonstrate, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the formal composition of puns in one of Shakespeare’s early festive comedies, i.e. Love’s labour’s lost (c1593/4). Pun is defined here after Delabastita (1993: 57) as a phenomenon depending for its existence on the juxtaposition of (at least two) similar/identical forms and (at least two) dissimilar meanings, where, broadly speaking, the subtler the formal contrast and the sharper the semantic one, the finer the punning effect. The reason behind selecting this particular play for the examination has been the initial assumption that, rich in verbal experiments of all sorts, it might prove a fertile source of punning forms which, indeed, run altogether to 423 instances. The qualitative study is essentially two-partite and, initially, sets out to investigate linguistic phenomena which lay down the framework of formal relationships in a pun (and are, thus, in a mutually exclusive way, obligatory for its creation), namely homonymy, homophony and paronymy. Next, punning forms are grouped into interlingual puns, proper name puns as well as idiom- and compound- based puns. On top of that, a quantitative analysis is carried out which demonstrates (in a tabular and graphic form) the overall numerical and percentage distribution of all categories of puns established in the present research study

Ambiguity and language evolution: Evolution of homophones and syllable number of words

We investigate the evolution of homophones and its relation to the evolution of syllable number of words, based on the quantitative analysis on the historical data and simulation. We suggest that homophones are the outcome of arranging form-meaning associations according to Zipf’s law to maximize the referential power under effort for the speaker constraints. We also discuss the neural bases of ambiguity and the relation between ambiguity and robustness in language evolution. Furthermore, we show that homophones are stable and cumulate with the times. To avoid creating homophones, syllable number of words increases, with more recent entry dates of words associated with more syllables. We also explore stability of homophones and instability of synonyms in children’s acquisition process. The mechanism of the evolution of homophones and syllable length of words works cross-linguistically from the emergence of language and goes on at present

Quantifying the Functional Consequences of Spanish [s] Lenition: Plural Marking and Derived Homophony in Western Andalusian and Castilian

In this thesis, a new methodology is proposed for investigating Spanish [s] lenition (sound weakening or loss) via morphological analysis instead of phonetics. Word-final [s] is a morphological plural marker in Castilian Spanish, but is rarely produced in Western Andalusian Spanish (WAS). It is often asserted in the literature that the loss of [s] in WAS requires plurality to be expressed via alternative means. The results of this study rule out lexical and morpho-syntactic compensation for [s] lenition in WAS in several previously untested domains, and imply that there is no functional motivation in Modern Spanish driving a need for compensation for word-final [s] lenition on nouns or determiners. This investigation is built on a predictable calculation of the environments in which the loss of [s] may result in derived singular/plural homophony in WAS nouns. This is used to quantify potential semantic ambiguity. A frequency comparison of 27,366 WAS and Castilian nouns, across 60 specific Determiner + Noun phrase environments, finds no significant differences between the dialects in the type or token frequencies of numerically ambiguous nouns, nor in 98.7% of the tested phrase environments. When taken in context with studies excluding phonetic compensation in WAS, the current results suggest that the low semantic relevance of word-final [s] in Modern Spanish is a potentially far-reaching explanation for the variable manifestations of [s] lenition experienced in Spanish dialects across the world

The Prosody and Morphology of Elastic Words in Chinese: Annotations and Analyses.

Elastic words are those whose length can vary between monosyllabic and disyllabic, without changing the meaning. Though elastic words have known to be many in Chinese, it is still not clear how many words are elastic. In addition, there is no consensus on the motivation of creating elastic words. This dissertation offers a complete annotation of elastic words in modern Standard Chinese and sample annotations of Middle Chinese, and investigates why elastic words are created. Specifically, it examines four properties of elastic words focusing on the homophone-avoidance theory and the prosody theory. The former, by far the most popular one, proposes that disyllabic words are created to reduce homophony and avoid ambiguity after massive syllable loss. In contrast, the prosody theory proposes that elastic words are created because disyllabic words are needed in prosodically strong positions, due to the requirement of Foot Binarity. First, a study examines the relation between homophony and elastic words, based on a complete length elasticity annotation of Modern Chinese Dictionary (2005). Results show that there is no correlation between homophony and elastic words. The second study examines the effect of word category on elastic words in modern Standard Chinese. Results show that (i) half of words in Chinese lexicon are elastic; (ii) content words have higher percentage of elastic words than function words. The third study examines the historical development of elastic words, with a focus on Middle Chinese, especially Tang poems. Results show that there are many elastic words in Middle Chinese, similar to that in Modern Chinese. The fourth study examines word length in Chinese dialects, focusing on Mandarin and Cantonese. Results show that they have similar percentages of disyllabic words and that the size of syllable inventory has no effect on word length. Various evidence consistently points to the conclusion that the prosody theory offers a better explanation of why elastic words are created in Chinese, despite of the fact that the homophone-avoidance theory seems quite intuitive and natural. In other words, elastic words are created to fulfill prosodic requirement rather than to compensate for syllable loss or an increase in homophony.PhDLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116629/1/yandong_1.pd

Interaction of phonological biases and frequency in learning a probabilistic language pattern

We examine how learning a phonological rule in an artificial language interacts with morphological and lexical learning. We exposed adult participants to an artificial language in which noun plurals were marked by one of two prefix forms (ba- or ni-), one of which also triggered a velar palatalization rule (e.g., singular kimu, plural ni-chimu). In some conditions, the rule additionally created homophony. We also manipulated the relative frequency of the two prefix variants. The results showed that participants shifted away from using the rule-triggering prefix (ni-), but only when it was already the less frequent prefix. We attribute this effect to a paradigm uniformity bias leading participants to avoid phonological alternations (particularly in the stem). When the rule created homophony between lexical items, participants were less able to learn the rule, but it did not affect their choice of prefix. We attribute this effect to homophony avoidance interfering with participants' ability to extract the phonological generalization