1887
Volume 2, Issue 2
  • ISSN 2589-1588
  • E-ISSN: 2589-1596
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

Abstract

Regularities in natural language systems, despite their cognitive advantages in terms of storage and learnability, often coexist with exceptions, raising the question of whether and why irregularities survive. We offer a complex system perspective on this issue, focusing on the irregular past tense forms in English. Two separate processes affect the overall regularity: new verbs constantly entering the vocabulary in the regular form at low frequency, and transitions in both directions (from irregular to regular and vice-versa) occurring in a narrow frequency range. The introduction of new verbs leads to an increase in regular types, that, entering at low frequencies, have a small impact on the perceived irregularity in terms of tokens. The frequency of usage acts as a control parameter, the majority of verbs types being fully-regular(irregular) at low(high) frequencies, with no evidence of irregularity facing extinction. Very few verbs types in an intermediate frequency region exhibit both regular and irregular forms at the same time, suggesting that the coexistence is unstable. The observed pattern of usage showing an abrupt change in response to small variations of the control parameter only appears in agent-based models provided that the word state is non-binary. By introducing this key ingredient, high-frequency irregular past-tense can survive the tendency to regularize over time, as observed in natural languages.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/elt.00018.col
2021-01-15
2025-04-24
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Baron, N. S.
    (2000) Alphabet to email: how written English evolved and where it’s heading. London; New York, NY: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Baronchelli, A. , Dall’Asta, L. , Barrat, A. , & Loreto, V.
    (2007) Nonequilibrium phase transition in negotiation dynamics. Physical Review E, 76, 051102. 10.1103/PhysRevE.76.051102
    https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.76.051102 [Google Scholar]
  3. Beckner, C. , Ellis, N. C. , Blythe, R. , Holland, J. , Bybee, J. , Ke, J. , Christiansen, M. H. , Larsen-Freeman, D. , Croft, W. , Schoenemann, T. , & Five Graces Group
    (2009) Language is a complex adaptive system: Position paper. Language Learning, 59(Suppl 1), 1–26.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Berg, Th.
    (1998) An Explanation from Language Processing Linguistic Structure and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Binney, J. , Dowrick, N. , Fisher, A. , & Newman, M.
    (1992) The Theory of Critical Phenomena: An Introduction to the Renormalization Group. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Boroditsky, L.
    (2001) Does language shape thought? Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time. Cognitive psychology, 43(1), 1–22. 10.1006/cogp.2001.0748
    https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.2001.0748 [Google Scholar]
  7. Bromham, L. , Hua, X. , Fitzpatrick, Th. G. , & Greenhill, S. J.
    (2012) Rate of language evolution and population size. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 112(7), 2097–2102. 10.1073/pnas.1419704112
    https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1419704112 [Google Scholar]
  8. Carroll, R. , Svare, R. , & Salmons, J. C.
    (2012) Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of German verbs, Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2(2), 153–172. 10.1075/jhl.2.2.01car
    https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.2.2.01car [Google Scholar]
  9. CELEX = Kerkman, H. , Piepenbrock, R. , Baayen, R. H. , van Rijn, H. , & Burnage, G.
    (1993) The Celex Lexical Database. Nijmegen: Centre for Lexical Information, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, accessible atcelex.mpi.nl/
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Chao, Y. R.
    (1950) Review of G. K. Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. Language, 26(3), 394–401.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Chomsky, N.
    (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. (1975) Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Clark, R. , & Roberts, I.
    (1993) A computational model of language learnability and language change. Linguistic Inquiry, 24(2), 299–345.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. CoHA = Davies, M.
    (2010–) The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words, 1810–2009, accessible athttps://www.english-corpora.org/coha/
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Colaiori, F. , Castellano, C.
    (2015) Interplay between media and social influence in the collective behavior of opinion dynamics. Physical Review E, 92, 042815. 10.1103/PhysRevE.92.042815
    https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.042815 [Google Scholar]
  16. (2016) Consensus versus persistence of disagreement in opinion formation: the role of zealots. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 2016, 033401. 10.1088/1742‑5468/2016/03/033401
    https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2016/03/033401 [Google Scholar]
  17. Colaiori, F. , Castellano, C. , Cuskley, C. F. , Loreto, V. , Pugliese, M. , & Tria, F.
    (2015) General three-state model with biased population replacement: Analytical solution and application to language dynamics. Physical Review E, 91, 012808. 10.1103/PhysRevE.91.012808
    https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.91.012808 [Google Scholar]
  18. Cook, R. S. , Kay, P. , & Regier, T.
    (2005) The World Color Survey Database. In H. Cohen & C. Lefebvre (Eds.), Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science (pp.223–241). Amsterdam: Elsevier. 10.1016/B978‑008044612‑7/50064‑0
    https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-008044612-7/50064-0 [Google Scholar]
  19. Cuskley, C. F. , Pugliese, M. , Castellano, C. , Colaiori, F. , Loreto, V. , & Tria, F.
    (2014) Internal and external dynamics in language: Evidence from verb regularity in a historical corpus of English, PLoS ONE, 9(8), e102882. 10.1371/journal.pone.0102882
    https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102882 [Google Scholar]
  20. Cuskley, C. , Castellano, C. , Colaiori, F. , Loreto, V. , Pugliese, M. , Tria, F.
    (2014) Frequency and stability of linguistic variants. In E. A. Cartmill , S. Roberts , H. Lyn & H. Cornish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (EVOLANG 10), Vienna, Austria, 14–17 April 2014 (pp.417–418). London: World Scientific.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Cuskley, C. , Castellano, C. , Colaiori, F. , Loreto, V. , Pugliese, M. , & Tria, F.
    (2017) The regularity game: Investigating linguistic rule dynamics in a population of interacting agents. Cognition, 159, 25–32. 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.11.001
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.11.001 [Google Scholar]
  22. Cuskley, C. , Colaiori, F. , Castellano, C. , Loreto, V. , Pugliese, M. , & Tria, F.
    (2015) The adoption of linguistic rules in native and non-native speakers: Evidence from a Wug task. Journal of Memory and Language, 84, 205–223. 10.1016/j.jml.2015.06.005
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.06.005 [Google Scholar]
  23. De Smet, I. , & Van de Velde, F.
    (2019) Reassessing the evolution of West Germanic preterite inflection. Diachronica, 36(2), 139–180. 10.1075/dia.18020.des
    https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.18020.des [Google Scholar]
  24. Everett, D.
    (2013) Language: The Cultural Tool. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Ferrer i Cancho, R. , & Solé, R. V.
    (2003) Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 100(3), 788–791. 10.1073/pnas.0335980100
    https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0335980100 [Google Scholar]
  26. Gilquin, G.
    (2010) Language production: A window to the mind?In H. Götzsche (Ed.), Memory, Mind and Language (pp.89–102). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Kay, P. , & Regier, T.
    (2003) Resolving the question of color naming universals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 100(15), 9085–9089. 10.1073/pnas.1532837100
    https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1532837100 [Google Scholar]
  28. Lakoff, G.
    (1987) Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 10.7208/chicago/9780226471013.001.0001
    https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226471013.001.0001 [Google Scholar]
  29. Lieberman, E. , Michel, J. B. , Jackson, J. , Tang, T. , & Nowak, M. A.
    (2007) Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language. Nature, 449, 713–716. 10.1038/nature06137
    https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06137 [Google Scholar]
  30. Lightfoot, D.
    (1999) The Development of Language: Acquisition, Change and Evolution. Oxford: Blackwell.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Loreto, V. , Baronchelli, A. , Mukherjee, A. , Puglisi, A. , & Tria, F.
    (2011) Statistical physics of language dynamics. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 2011, P04006. 10.1088/1742‑5468/2011/04/P04006
    https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2011/04/P04006 [Google Scholar]
  32. Loreto, V. , Mukherjee, A. , & Tria, F.
    (2012) On the origin of the hierarchy of color names. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 109(18), 6819–6824. 10.1073/pnas.1113347109
    https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1113347109 [Google Scholar]
  33. Lupyan, G. , & Dale, R.
    (2010) Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure. PLoS ONE, 5, e8559. 10.1371/journal.pone.0008559
    https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0008559 [Google Scholar]
  34. Pijpops, D. , Beuls, K. , & Van de Velde, F.
    (2015) The rise of the verbal weak inflection in Germanic. An agent-based model. Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Journal, 5, 81–102.
    [Google Scholar]
  35. Pinker, S.
    (2007) The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  36. Puglisi, A. , Baronchelli, A. , & Loreto, V.
    (2008) Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic categories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 105(23), 7936–7940. 10.1073/pnas.0802485105
    https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0802485105 [Google Scholar]
  37. Pugliese, M. , Loreto, V. , Cuskley, C. , Castellano, C. , Colaiori, F. , Tria, F.
    (2014) The Role of Coordination in regularization. In E. A. Cartmill , S. Roberts , H. Lyn & H. Cornish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (EVOLANG 10), Vienna, Austria, 14–17 April 2014 (pp.417–418). London: World Scientific.
    [Google Scholar]
  38. Sankoff, G.
    (2002) Linguistic Outcomes of Language Contact. In J. K. Chambers , P. Trudgill & N. Schilling-Estes (Eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (pp.638–668). Oxford: Blackwell.
    [Google Scholar]
  39. Sigurd, B. , Eeg-Olofsson, M. , & Van De Weijer, J.
    (2004) Word length, sentence length and frequency – Zipf revisited. Studia Linguistica, 58(1), 37–52. 10.1111/j.0039‑3193.2004.00109.x
    https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0039-3193.2004.00109.x [Google Scholar]
  40. Tria, F. , Galantucci, B. , & Loreto, V.
    (2012) Naming a structured world: A cultural route to duality of patterning. PLoS ONE, 7, e37744. 10.1371/journal.pone.0037744
    https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0037744 [Google Scholar]
  41. Tria, F. , Loreto, V. , Servedio, V. D. P. , & Strogatz, S. H.
    (2014) The dynamics of correlated novelties. Scientific Reports – Nature, 4, 5890. 10.1038/srep05890
    https://doi.org/10.1038/srep05890 [Google Scholar]
  42. Yang, Ch.
    (2016) The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035323.001.0001
    https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262035323.001.0001 [Google Scholar]
  43. Zipf, G. K.
    (1929) Relative Frequency as a Determinant of Phonetic Change. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 40, 1–95. 10.2307/310585
    https://doi.org/10.2307/310585 [Google Scholar]
  44. (1949) Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Press.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1075/elt.00018.col
Loading
  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): agent-based modeling; complex systems; English past-tense; rules and exceptions
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error