Inherent causes of language change

The inevitable causes of language change are considered in this article. It gives an up-to-date view of the phonetic natural tendencies which are the predictable result of a human’s anatomical, physiological and psychological make-up. В статті розглядаються неминучі причини зміни мови. Вона пропонує сучасний погляд на природні тенденції у фонетиці, які є передбачуваним результатом анатомічної, фізіологічної та психологічної будови людини

The Logic of Language Change

A discussion of the relation of dialectical transitions in Hegel's speculative logic to changes in categories and grammar in the empirical historical languages

Linguistically Grounded Models of Language Change

Questions related to the evolution of language have recently known an impressive increase of interest (Briscoe, 2002). This short paper aims at questioning the scientific status of these models and their relations to attested data. We show that one cannot directly model non-linguistic factors (exogenous factors) even if they play a crucial role in language evolution. We then examine the relation between linguistic models and attested language data, as well as their contribution to cognitive linguistics

Utterance Selection Model of Language Change

We present a mathematical formulation of a theory of language change. The theory is evolutionary in nature and has close analogies with theories of population genetics. The mathematical structure we construct similarly has correspondences with the Fisher-Wright model of population genetics, but there are significant differences. The continuous time formulation of the model is expressed in terms of a Fokker-Planck equation. This equation is exactly soluble in the case of a single speaker and can be investigated analytically in the case of multiple speakers who communicate equally with all other speakers and give their utterances equal weight. Whilst the stationary properties of this system have much in common with the single-speaker case, time-dependent properties are richer. In the particular case where linguistic forms can become extinct, we find that the presence of many speakers causes a two-stage relaxation, the first being a common marginal distribution that persists for a long time as a consequence of ultimate extinction being due to rare fluctuations.Comment: 21 pages, 17 figure

Diversity, competition, extinction: the ecophysics of language change

As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of information exchanges and communicative constraints in groups of agents under selective scenarios. These models have been very helpful in providing a rationale on how complex forms of communication emerge under evolutionary pressures. However, other patterns of large-scale organization can be described using mathematical methods ignoring communicative traits. These approaches consider shorter time scales and have been developed by exploiting both theoretical ecology and statistical physics methods. The models are reviewed here and include extinction, invasion, origination, spatial organization, coexistence and diversity as key concepts and are very simple in their defining rules. Such simplicity is used in order to catch the most fundamental laws of organization and those universal ingredients responsible for qualitative traits. The similarities between observed and predicted patterns indicate that an ecological theory of language is emerging, supporting (on a quantitative basis) its ecological nature, although key differences are also present. Here we critically review some recent advances lying and outline their implications and limitations as well as open problems for future research.Comment: 17 Pages. A review on current models from statistical Physics and Theoretical Ecology applied to study language dynamic

Extracting information from S-curves of language change

It is well accepted that adoption of innovations are described by S-curves (slow start, accelerating period, and slow end). In this paper, we analyze how much information on the dynamics of innovation spreading can be obtained from a quantitative description of S-curves. We focus on the adoption of linguistic innovations for which detailed databases of written texts from the last 200 years allow for an unprecedented statistical precision. Combining data analysis with simulations of simple models (e.g., the Bass dynamics on complex networks) we identify signatures of endogenous and exogenous factors in the S-curves of adoption. We propose a measure to quantify the strength of these factors and three different methods to estimate it from S-curves. We obtain cases in which the exogenous factors are dominant (in the adoption of German orthographic reforms and of one irregular verb) and cases in which endogenous factors are dominant (in the adoption of conventions for romanization of Russian names and in the regularization of most studied verbs). These results show that the shape of S-curve is not universal and contains information on the adoption mechanism. (published at "J. R. Soc. Interface, vol. 11, no. 101, (2014) 1044"; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.1044)Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, Supplementary Material is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.122178

Do language change rates depend on population size?

An earlier study (Nettle 1999b) concluded, based on computer simulations and some inferences from empirical data, that languages will change the more slowly the larger the population gets. We replicate this study using a more complete language model for simulations (the Schulze model combined with a Barabasi-Albert net- work) and a richer empirical dataset (the World Atlas of Language Structures edited by Haspelmath et al. 2005). Our simulations show either a weak or stronger dependence of language change on population sizes depending on the parameter settings, and empirical data, like some of the simulations, show a weak dependence.Comment: 20 pages including all figures for a linguistic journa