Kielen muutos evolutiivisena prosessina

In the thesis it is discussed in what ways concepts and methodology developed in evolutionary biology can be applied to the explanation and research of language change. The parallel nature of the mechanisms of biological evolution and language change is explored along with the history of the exchange of ideas between these two disciplines. Against this background computational methods developed in evolutionary biology are taken into consideration in terms of their applicability to the study of historical relationships between languages. Different phylogenetic methods are explained in common terminology, avoiding the technical language of statistics. The thesis is on one hand a synthesis of earlier scientific discussion, and on the other an attempt to map out the problems of earlier approaches in addition to finding new guidelines in the study of language change on their basis. Primarily literature about the connections between evolutionary biology and language change, along with research articles describing applications of phylogenetic methods into language change have been used as source material. The thesis starts out by describing the initial development of the disciplines of evolutionary biology and historical linguistics, a process which right from the beginning can be seen to have involved an exchange of ideas concerning the mechanisms of language change and biological evolution. The historical discussion lays the foundation for the handling of the generalised account of selection developed during the recent few decades. This account is aimed for creating a theoretical framework capable of explaining both biological evolution and cultural change as selection processes acting on self-replicating entities. This thesis focusses on the capacity of the generalised account of selection to describe language change as a process of this kind. In biology, the mechanisms of evolution are seen to form populations of genetically related organisms through time. One of the central questions explored in this thesis is whether selection theory makes it possible to picture languages are forming populations of a similar kind, and what a perspective like this can offer to the understanding of language in general. In historical linguistics, the comparative method and other, complementing methods have been traditionally used to study the development of languages from a common ancestral language. Computational, quantitative methods have not become widely used as part of the central methodology of historical linguistics. After the fading of a limited popularity enjoyed by the lexicostatistical method since the 1950s, only in the recent years have also the computational methods of phylogenetic inference used in evolutionary biology been applied to the study of early language history. In this thesis the possibilities offered by the traditional methodology of historical linguistics and the new phylogenetic methods are compared. The methods are approached through the ways in which they have been applied to the Indo-European languages, which is the most thoroughly investigated language family using both the traditional and the phylogenetic methods. The problems of these applications along with the optimal form of the linguistic data used in these methods are explored in the thesis. The mechanisms of biological evolution are seen in the thesis as parallel in a limited sense to the mechanisms of language change, however sufficiently so that the development of a generalised account of selection is deemed as possibly fruiful for understanding language change. These similarities are also seen to support the validity of using phylogenetic methods in the study of language history, although the use of linguistic data and the models of language change employed by these models are seen to await further development.Tutkielma käsittelee evoluutiobiologiassa kehitetyn käsitteistön ja metodologian soveltamista kielenmuutoksen selittämiseen ja tutkimukseen. Tutkielmassa taustoitetaan biologisen evoluution ja kielenmuutoksen mekanismien rinnasteisuutta sekä näiden kahden eri alan teoreettisen tutkimuksen välisen vuoropuhelun historiaa. Tämän taustan pohjalta käsitellään evoluutiobiologiassa käytettyjen laskennallisten menetelmien soveltuvuutta kielihistorian selvittämiseen. Erilaiset menetelmät pyritään myös esittelemään yleistajuisesti jättäen tilastotieteen teknisen terminologian taustalle. Tutkielma on toisaalta synteesi aihepiirin aiemmasta tieteellisestä keskustelusta, ja toisaalta pyrkimys kartoittaa tähänastisten lähestymistapojen ongelmakohtia sekä löytää uusia suuntaviivoja kielen muutoksen tutkimuksessa niiden pohjalta. Lähdeaineistona on käytetty ensi sijassa evoluutiobiologian ja kielenmuutoksen välisiä yhteyksiä käsittelevää kirjallisuutta sekä fylogeneettisiä menetelmiä kielenmuutokseen soveltavia tutkimusartikkeleita. Tutkielma lähtee liikkeelle kuvaamalla evoluutiobiologian ja historiallisen kielitieteen tutkimusalojen kehitystä, johon nähdään kuuluneen alusta alkaen vuoropuhelu kielenmuutoksen ja biologisen evoluution mekanismeista. Historiallinen käsittely luo pohjaa viime vuosikymmeninä kehitetyn nk. yleisen valintateorian lähestymiselle. Yleinen valintateoria pyrkii muodostamaan viitekehyksen, joka pystyisi selittämään sekä biologista että kulttuurista evoluutiota replikaatioon perustuvana valintaprosessina. Tutkielmassa keskitytään tarkastelemaan yleisen valintateorian kykyä kuvata kielenmuutosta tällaisena prosessina. Biologiassa evoluution mekanismien nähdään muodostavan eliöiden populaatioita ajan kuluessa. Yksi keskeisistä tutkielmassa käsiteltävistä kysymyksistä on se, mahdollistaako valintateoria nähdä kielten muodostavan populaatioita, ja mitä tällaisesta näkökulmasta seuraa kielen ymmärtämiselle. Historiallisessa kielitieteessä kielten kehittymistä yhteisestä kantamuodosta on tutkittu perinteisesti vertailumenetelmällä ja muilla, sitä täydentävillä, menetelmillä joilla käsitellään suurta määrää kielellisiä muotoja koskevia muutoksia. Laskennalliset menetelmät eivät ole toistaiseksi tulleet osaksi historiallisen kielitieteen vakiometodologiaa. 1950-luvulta lähtien rajallisesti käytetyn leksikostatistisen merkityksen vähennyttyä entisestään kielihistorian tutkimukseen on aivan viime vuosina sovellettu myös evoluutiobiologiassa käytettyjä tilastollisia fylogeneettisen päättelyn laskennallisia malleja. Tutkielma vertaa historiallisen kielitieteen perinteistä metodologiaa ja uusien fylogeneettisten menetelmien tarjoamia mahdollisuuksia. Menetelmiä lähestytään sen kautta, miten niitä on sovellettu indoeurooppalaisiin kieliin, joka on eniten tutkittu kielikunta sekä perinteisillä että fylogeneettisillä menetelmillä. Tutkielmassa käydään läpi fylogeneettisten menetelmien sovellusten tähänastisia ongelmia sekä käytettävän kieliaineiston optimaalista muotoa. Biologisen evoluution mekanismit nähdään tutkielmassa rajallisessa määrin rinnasteisina kielenmuutoksen mekanismeihin, kuitenkin siinä määrin että yleisen valintateorian kehittäminen todetaan mahdollisesti hedelmälliseksi kielenmuutoksen ymmärtämiseksi. Yhtäläisyyksien ansiosta myös biologisesta tutkimuksesta peräisin olevien fylogeneettisten menetelmien nähdään olevan päteviä apuvälineitä kielenmuutoksen tutkimukseen, joskin kieliaineiston käytön ja menetelmien käyttämien kielenmuutoksen mallien todetaan odottavan lisäkehitystä

New arguments for a Central Solomons family based on evidence from pronominal morphemes

In the Solomon Islands, four Papuan languages are spoken: Savosavo, Touo, Lavukaleve, and Bilua. Some scholars, namely Todd and Ross, have tried to prove that these languages are genetically related through the comparison of pronouns and other morphemes, such as object and subject affixes. Although a similarity in the pronominal forms has been identified, the low number of lexical similarities has not allowed a definitive conclusion on the existence of the family.In this paper, the pronouns and all other morphemes that carry information on gender, person, or number in each language are compared in order to identify recurrent forms carrying identical gender, person, or number information. These recurring forms are used to perform internal reconstructions in each language, which in turn are used to propose a reconstruction of some pronouns of the putative protolanguage and a family tree. The comparison among the four languages leads to the identification of an identical syncretism in clusivity between first person inclusive and second person nonsingular morphemes, which is expressed with the same form in the four languages. This syncretism, together with the very similar first and second person pronominal paradigms, are adduced as new arguments in favor of the existence of a Central Solomons family.Language Use in Past and Presen

Experience-based language acquisition: a computational model of human language acquisition

Almost from the very beginning of the digital age, people have sought better ways to communicate with computers. This research investigates how computers might be enabled to understand natural language in a more humanlike way. Based, in part, on cognitive development in infants, we introduce an open computational framework for visual perception and grounded language acquisition called Experience-Based Language Acquisition (EBLA). EBLA can “watch” a series of short videos and acquire a simple language of nouns and verbs corresponding to the objects and object-object relations in those videos. Upon acquiring this protolanguage, EBLA can perform basic scene analysis to generate descriptions of novel videos. The general architecture of EBLA is comprised of three stages: vision processing, entity extraction, and lexical resolution. In the vision processing stage, EBLA processes the individual frames in short videos, using a variation of the mean shift analysis image segmentation algorithm to identify and store information about significant objects. In the entity extraction stage, EBLA abstracts information about the significant objects in each video and the relationships among those objects into internal representations called entities. Finally, in the lexical acquisition stage, EBLA extracts the individual lexemes (words) from simple descriptions of each video and attempts to generate entity-lexeme mappings using an inference technique called cross-situational learning. EBLA is not primed with a base lexicon, so it faces the task of bootstrapping its lexicon from scratch. The performance of EBLA has been evaluated based on acquisition speed and accuracy of scene descriptions. For a test set of simple animations, EBLA had average acquisition success rates as high as 100% and average description success rates as high as 96.7%. For a larger set of real videos, EBLA had average acquisition success rates as high as 95.8% and average description success rates as high as 65.3%. The lower description success rate for the videos is attributed to the wide variance in entities across the videos. While there have been several systems capable of learning object or event labels for videos, EBLA is the first known system to acquire both nouns and verbs using a grounded computer vision system

Language Origins: From mythology to science, 226 s.

The science of language evolution appeared at the end of the last century but top¬ically belongs to language origins – the domain of investigation that is concerned with the beginnings and diversification of language. Language evolution as a research area contrasts with the antiquity of language origins, which can be traced back to the earliest forms of traditional reflection. Language evolution emphasises its scientific orientation, whereas throughout most of its history language origins constituted a complex mixture of mythology, philosophy of language, as well as religiously and scientifically inspired speculation. This work is the first book-long attempt to document the whole history of language origins and situate language evolution in this wide intellectual context

Using Global Constraints and Reranking to Improve Cognates Detection

Global constraints and reranking have not been used in cognates detection research to date. We propose methods for using global constraints by performing rescoring of the score matrices produced by state of the art cognates detection systems. Using global constraints to perform rescoring is complementary to state of the art methods for performing cognates detection and results in significant performance improvements beyond current state of the art performance on publicly available datasets with different language pairs and various conditions such as different levels of baseline state of the art performance and different data size conditions, including with more realistic large data size conditions than have been evaluated with in the past.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables; published in the Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1983-1992, Vancouver, Canada, July 201

*gwes-, *(z)gwes- or *(s)gwesh2-? The PIE root for 'extinguish/go out'

Linguistic