Universal attractors in language evolution provide evidence for the kinds of efficiency pressures involved

Seržant, Ilja A.; Moroz, George

doi:10.1057/s41599-022-01072-0

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Chunking follows from information-theoretic research on effort reduction (e.g. Shannon, 1948;Zipf, 1949;Aylett & Turk, 2006;Grünwald, 2007;Levshina, 2022), though as we explain below, the application here refers to effort-reduction in the retrieval of symbols, rather than their external articulation (Seržant & Moroz, 2022). Adjacency is obvious enough to be tacitly assumed in psycholinguistic research on holisticallymemorised complex symbols.…”

Section: Inter-predictability and Linear Proximitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The emergence of grammatical structure from inter-predictability

Mansfield¹,

Kemp²

2023

Preprint

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Recent research has shown that words or morphemes that are closer to each other in linear order tend to have higher statistical inter-predictability, measured as mutual information. We offer an explanation for this in terms of holistic chunking of inter-predictable symbols, which provides an efficiency gain in the retrieval of stored symbols to encode a message. Inter-predictable chunking then interacts with structural priming to produce the schematic linear structures that are characteristic of both syntax and morphology. We thus argue that predictability and efficiency play a key role in the emergence of grammatical structure, going beyond previous information-theoretic analyses of natural language. In this paper we articulate some fundamental principles of chunking and linearisation, and use a simple computational implementation to show that these are sufficient to produce natural-language-like structures, using NP-internal ordering as a case study.

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Section: Inter-predictability and Linear Proximitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…articulatory reduction or word length), the proposal here applies the same mathematical principles to efficient retrieval of symbols from a lexicon (cf. Seržant & Moroz, 2022). In our model, chunking is based on the PMI of symbol combinations, which we call INFORMATIONAL CHUNKING.…”

Section: Inter-predictable Symbols and The Efficient Communication Tr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The emergence of grammatical structure from inter-predictability

Mansfield¹,

Kemp²

2023

Preprint

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Diachronic pathways to case marking alignment and what they mean for the explanation of synchronic cross-linguistic patterns

Cristofaro

2024

JHL

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Case marking alignment has been assumed to reflect principles of optimization: dedicated case marking is limited to arguments more in need of disambiguation, and semantically or pragmatically similar arguments are encoded by the same case forms. This view is based on the synchronic properties of the relevant alignment patterns and the cross-linguistic rarity of other logically possible ones, not diachronic phenomena involved in their emergence or cross-linguistic distribution. This paper explores several developmental processes that recurrently give rise to accusative, ergative, and active case marking alignment cross-linguistically, including reanalysis of argument structure, the development of case forms through grammaticalization or phonological reduction, and the extension of an existing case form to novel contexts. These processes appear to be driven by inherent or contextual properties of particular source constructions, independent of principles of optimization in the use of case marking. The synchronic properties of the resulting alignment patterns cannot be taken as evidence for such principles either, because they are due to inheritance (a case form inherits the distribution of particular source elements or developmental processes, which is unrelated to the assumed optimization principles) or residue (a case form becomes restricted to particular arguments as a new form develops for the other arguments, also independently of these principles). These facts call for a source-oriented approach to case marking alignment and recurrent cross-linguistic patterns in general, one where the focus shifts from the synchronic properties of individual patterns to unraveling the effects of several different diachronic phenomena that give rise to individual patterns and shape their cross-linguistic distribution over time.

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The interaction of affix size, type and shape: a cross-linguistic study

Zingler,

Rogers

2024

Linguistic Typology

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This study explores the phonological structure of affixes based on different parameters. We begin by investigating the common but insufficiently supported claim that affixes tend to be monosyllabic, and we then take up the ideas that prefixes and suffixes differ in terms of size and in their proclivity for allomorphy. Our database consists of affix lists of 25 unrelated languages, which come from all six geographical macro-areas and yield a total of 1,454 affixes (403 prefixes, 1,051 suffixes). The results show that both prefixes and suffixes are most often monosyllabic, but prefixes are still significantly shorter than suffixes in terms of segments and syllables. There is no significant difference in terms of allomorphy. We argue that the monosyllabic tendency emerges as an artifact, given that a monosyllabic affix is long enough to be perceived, short enough to be economical, and compatible even with simple syllable structures. Meanwhile, prefixes are shorter than suffixes because they pose a challenge for comprehension and because syllable onsets in many languages allow more complexity than codas. The overall insight is that syllables are a prominent domain in morphology as well as phonology, even though various factors may undermine the overlap of affixes and syllables.

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Universal attractors in language evolution provide evidence for the kinds of efficiency pressures involved

Cited by 8 publications

References 55 publications

The emergence of grammatical structure from inter-predictability

The emergence of grammatical structure from inter-predictability

Diachronic pathways to case marking alignment and what they mean for the explanation of synchronic cross-linguistic patterns

The interaction of affix size, type and shape: a cross-linguistic study

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