Sociolinguistic reflection in the context of language standardization: language debates on Estonian 1912-1920

http://www.ester.ee/record=b4484137*es

Meaning and meaning fields: A non-dualist approach by Martin Staude

Review of Meaning in Communication, Cognition, and Reality: Outline of a Theory from Semiotics, Philosophy, and Sociology, by Martin Staude. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2012

Usage context influences the evolution of overspecification in Iterated Learning

This article investigates the influence of contextual pressures on the evolution of overspecification, i.e. the degree to which communicatively irrelevant meaning dimensions are specified, in an iterated learning setup. To this end, we combine two lines of research: In artificial language learning studies, it has been shown that (miniature) languages adapt to their contexts of use. In experimental pragmatics, it has been shown that referential overspecification in natural language is more likely to occur in contexts in which the communicatively relevant feature dimensions are harder to discern. We test whether similar functional pressures can promote the cumulative growth of referential overspecification in iterated artificial language learning. Participants were trained on an artificial language which they then used to refer to objects. The output of each participant was used as input for the next participant. The initial language was designed such that it did not show any overspecification, but it allowed for overspecification to emerge in 16 out of 32 usage contexts. Between conditions, we manipulated the referential context in which the target items appear, so that the relative visuospatial complexity of the scene would make the communicatively relevant feature dimensions more difficult to discern in one of them. The artificial languages became overspecified more quickly and to a significantly higher degree in this condition, indicating that the trend toward overspecification was stronger in these contexts, as suggested by experimental pragmatics research. These results add further support to the hypothesis that linguistic conventions can be partly determined by usage context and shows that experimental pragmatics can be fruitfully combined with artificial language learning to offer valuable insights into the mechanisms involved in the evolution of linguistic phenomena

Stratified corpus of written Estonian 1800-1940

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Kui palju on eesti keeles ilmunud raamatuid?

Ilmunud: https://digilab.rara.ee/blogi/kui-palju-on-eesti-keeles-ilmunud-raamatuid

Language Simplification in Composite Populations: Experimental Approach

The dissertation reports on a series of experiments that were conducted to establish a novel paradigm for investigating proximal mechanisms of diffusion in language simplification. The paradigm implements a semiotic matching task with learned miniature languages in a closed group in order to investigate how such language simplification would fare in the presence of an established community speaking a moderately complex language. For this, composite populations were made of three subjects, with one subject receiving a different training than the other two, representing minority and majority varieties respectively. Exploratory analyses on several pilot studies are reported and their implications for the experimental setup explained. The main experiment contrasts two minority varieties (one simple, one complex) in the presence of a majority complex variety, in order to test the hypothesis that a simple variety would prove more stable in such contact situations. The results indicate that the simple variety exhibited less change when comparing the languages on training with the final round of play (one-tailed t-test p < 0.01). Interestingly, this stability was not accompanied by a quicker success in establishing communication, in fact, the groups with a simple variety did worse. The findings warrants further studies into such communicative situations with a larger sample sizes, and the main aim of the dissertation is to provide a platform to begin from

Article supplement for Stratified corpus of written Estonian 1800-1940

Code to reproduce the figures in the article

Materials from BSSDH2021 / DIGMET 2021

Materials from the Baltic Summer School of Digital Humanities 2021: "Digital Methods in Humanities and Social Sciences" that took place in Tallinn, Aug 23-26, 2021. It includes links to the recordings, slides from the talks, and recommendations from a few of the talks