Christian Bentz

Languages with More Second Language Learners Tend to Lose Nominal Case

Inthispaper,weprovidequantitativeevidenceshowingthatlanguagesspokenbymanysecond languagespeakerstendtohaverelativelysmallnominalcasesystemsornonominalcaseatall. In our sample, all languages with more than 50% second language speakers had no nominal case. The negative association between the number of second language speakers and nominal casecomplexitygeneralizestodifferentlanguageareasandfamilies.Astherearemanystudies attestingtothedifficultyofacquiringmorphologicalcaseinsecondlanguageacquisition,this result supports the idea that languages adapt to the cognitive constraints of their speakers, as wellastothesociolinguisticnichesoftheirspeakingcommunities.Wediscussourresultswith respecttosociolinguistictypologyandtheLinguisticNicheHypothesis,aswellaswithrespect toqualitativedatafromhistoricallinguistics.Allinall,multiplelinesofevidenceconvergeon the idea that morphosyntactic complexity is reduced by a high degree of language contact involving adult learners.

A Quantitative Empirical Analysis of the Abstract/Concrete Distinction

This study presents original evidence that abstract and concrete concepts are organized and represented differently in the mind, based on analyses of thousands of concepts in publicly available data sets and computational resources. First, we show that abstract and concrete concepts have differing patterns of association with other concepts. Second, we test recent hypotheses that abstract concepts are organized according to association, whereas concrete concepts are organized according to (semantic) similarity. Third, we present evidence suggesting that concrete representations are more strongly feature-based than abstract concepts. We argue that degree of feature-based structure may fundamentally determine concreteness, and we discuss implications for cognitive and computational models of meaning.

Adaptive Communication: Languages with More Non-Native Speakers Tend to Have Fewer Word Forms

Explaining the diversity of languages across the world is one of the central aims of typological, historical, and evolutionary linguistics. We consider the effect of language contact-the number of non-native speakers a language has-on the way languages change and evolve. By analysing hundreds of languages within and across language families, regions, and text types, we show that languages with greater levels of contact typically employ fewer word forms to encode the same information content (a property we refer to as lexical diversity). Based on three types of statistical analyses, we demonstrate that this variance can in part be explained by the impact of non-native speakers on information encoding strategies. Finally, we argue that languages are information encoding systems shaped by the varying needs of their speakers. Language evolution and change should be modeled as the co-evolution of multiple intertwined adaptive systems: On one hand, the structure of human societies and human learning capabilities, and on the other, the structure of language.

Zipf's law and the grammar of languages: A quantitative study of Old and Modern English parallel texts

Abstract This paper reports a quantitative analysis of the relationship between word frequency distributions and morphological features in languages. We analyze a commonly-observed process of historical language change: The loss of inflected forms in favour of ‘analytic’ periphrastic constructions. These tendencies are observed in parallel translations of the Book of Genesis in Old English and Modern English. We show that there are significant differences in the frequency distributions of the two texts, and that parts of these differences are independent of total number of words, style of translation, orthography or contents. We argue that they derive instead from the trade-off between synthetic inflectional marking in Old English and analytic constructions in Modern English. By exploiting the earliest ideas of Zipf, we show that the syntheticity of the language in these texts can be captured mathematically, a property we tentatively call their grammatical fingerprint. Our findings suggest implications for both the specific historical process of inflection loss and more generally for the characterization of languages based on statistical properties.

LINGUISTIC ADAPTATION AT WORK? THE CHANGE OF WORD ORDER AND CASE SYSTEM FROM LATIN TO THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES

Understanding language evolution in terms of cultural transmission across generations of language users raises the possibility that some of the processes that have shaped language evolution can also be observed in historical language change. In this paper, we explore how constraints on production may affect the cultural evolution of language by analyzing the emergence of the Romance languages from Latin. Specifically, we focus on the change from Latin’s flexible but OV (Object-Verb) dominant word order with complex case marking to fixed SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) word order with little or no noun inflections in Romance Languages. We suggest that constraints on second language learners’ ability to produce sentences may help explain this historical change. We conclude that historical data on linguistic change can provide a useful source of information relevant to investigating the cognitive constraints that affect the cultural evolution of language.

THE IMPACT OF L2 SPEAKERS ON THE EVOLUTION OF CASE MARKING

This paper is a summary of a research project addressing the question of how L2 speakers in linguistic communities can shape the structure of languages. We present evidence in support for the view that L2 speakers have an impact on the future development of grammar, namely, that languages with more L2 speakers tend to lose abundant case marking systems. This is in line with the idea that language structure is predominantly the outcome of the processes of cultural evolution, language contact and language learning rather than biological evolution.

Towards a computational model of grammaticalization and lexical diversity

Languages use dierent lexical inventories to encode information, ranging from small sets of simplex words to large sets of morphologically complex words. Grammaticalization theories argue that this variation arises as the outcome of diachronic processes whereby co-occurring words merge to one word and build up complex morphology. To model these processes we present a) a quantitative measure of lexical diversity and b) a preliminary computational model of changes in lexical diversity over several generations of merging higly frequent collocates.

Variation in Word Frequency Distributions: Definitions, Measures and Implications for a Corpus-Based Language Typology

Abstract Word frequencies are central to linguistic studies investigating processing difficulty, learnability, age of acquisition, diachronic transmission and the relative weight given to a concept in society. However, there are few cross-linguistic studies on entire distributions of word frequencies, and even less on systematic changes within them. Here, we first define and test an exact measure for the relative difference between distributions – the Normalised Frequency Difference (NFD). We then apply this measure to parallel corpora in overall 19 languages, explaining systematic variation in the frequency distributions within the same language and across different languages. We further establish the NFD between lemmatised and un-lemmatised corpora as a frequency-based measure of inflectional productivity of a language. Finally, we argue that quantitative measures like the NFD can advance language typology beyond abstract, theory-driven expert judgments, towards more corpus-based, empirical and reproducible analyses.

ZIPF'S LAW ACROSS LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD: TOWARDS A QUANTITATIVE MEASURE OF LEXICAL DIVERSITY

Zipf’s law (Zipf, 1949) has been argued to differ systematically between texts and languages (Popescu et al., 2009), to change throughout time (Bentz, Kiela, Hill, & Buttery, forthcoming) and to reflect language complexity (Baixeries, Elvevag, & Ferrer-i-Cancho, 2013). Furthermore, we argue that Zipf’s law can be used as cross-linguistic, quantitative measure of the lexical diversity of languages (in parallel to biodiversity indices). In this context, lexical diversity is defined as the breadth of word forms used to encode a constant information content. A quantitative measure of lexical diversity can help to a) model factors driving the evolution of lexical encoding strategies on historical and evolutionary timescales, b) to determine the range of lexical diversities in natural languages and distinguish them from other symbolic encoding systems and animal communication. To show this, we estimated parameters of the Zipf-Mandelbrot law (Mandelbrot, 1953) for 363 parallel translations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) using a maximum likelihood method. The theoretical ZM distribution is assumed to be

The evolution of language families is shaped by the environment beyond neutral drift

There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world today1. It has been argued that the natural and social environment of languages drives this diversity2–13. However, a fundamental question is how strong are environmental pressures, and does neutral drift suffice as a mechanism to explain diversification? We estimate the phylogenetic signals of geographic dimensions, distance to water, climate and population size on more than 6,000 phylogenetic trees of 46 language families. Phylogenetic signals of environmental factors are generally stronger than expected under the null hypothesis of no relationship with the shape of family trees. Importantly, they are also—in most cases—not compatible with neutral drift models of constant-rate change across the family tree branches. Our results suggest that language diversification is driven by further adaptive and non-adaptive pressures. Language diversity cannot be understood without modelling the pressures that physical, ecological and social factors exert on language users in different environments across the globe.Bentz et al. estimate the phylogenetic signals of environmental factors and population size on more than 6,000 phylogenetic trees of 46 language families and find that environment influences the evolution of language families beyond neutral drift.