Linguistic studies have ranked languages by their rates of lexical and phonological change
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The retrieved literature discusses methods for estimating rates of lexical replacement and stability in linguistic features, but does not provide comprehensive rankings of languages by their rates of lexical and phonological change.
Languages do not replace their vocabularies at an even rate: words endure longer if they are used more frequently. This effect, which has parallels in evolutionary biology, has been demonstrated for the core vocabulary, a set of common, unrelated meanings. The extent to which it replicates in closed lexical classes remains to be seen, and may indicate how general this effect is in language change. Here, we use phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate the history of 10 kinship categories, a type of closed lexical class of content words, across 47 Indo-European languages. We find that their rate of replacement is correlated with their usage frequency, and this relationship is stronger than in the case of the core vocabulary, even though the envelope of variation is comparable across the two cases. We also find that the residual variation in the rate of replacement of kinship terms is related to genealogical distance of referent to kin. We argue that this relationship is the result of social changes and corresponding shifts in the entire semantic class of kinship terms, shifts typically not present in the core vocabulary. Thus, an understanding of the scope and limits of social change is needed to understand changes in kinship systems, and broader context is necessary to model cultural evolution in particular and the process of system change in general.
2019 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. Languages do not replace their vocabularies at an even rate: words endure longer if they are used more frequently. This effect, which has parallels in evolutionary biology, has been demonstrated for the core vocabulary, a set of common, unrelated meanings. The extent to which it replicates in closed lexical classes remains to be seen, and may indicate how general this effect is in language change.
Here, we use phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate the history of 10 kinship categories, a type of closed lexical class of content words, across 47 Indo-European languages. We find that their rate of replacement is correlated with their usage frequency, and this relationship is stronger than in the case of the core vocabulary, even though the envelope of variation is comparable across the two cases. We also find that the residual variation in the rate of replacement of kinship terms is related to genealogical distance of referent to kin.
The relationship between micro- and macro-evolutionary dynamics of cultural evolution is still not well understood: for example, what generalities can be made in how changes in speaker behaviour ramify up to differences between languages? Historical linguistics has increasingly drawn on the theory and methods of evolutionary biology to provide macro-evolutionary frameworks for understanding and analysing patterns of language relatedness, diversification and change.
Phylogenetic inference of large-scale language family relationships is increasingly commonplace [ 10 ] due to the development of quantitative models appropriate for lexical replacement [ 11 ]; in turn, analysts are able to estimate dates of diversification and age of origin of related languages [ 12 – 14 ] without assuming that language changes at constant rates. Phylogenetic methods have also demonstrated that the rate of replacement in the core vocabulary of a language correlates with its usage frequency in large-scale linguistic corpora [ 15 ]. The core vocabulary is a predefined set of frequent words such as ‘heart’, ‘walk’, ‘bone’ and ‘good’ [ 16 ].
For example, while German retains the Proto-Germanic form for ‘chair’, ‘Stuhl’, English has replaced it with the Latin form, probably as a result of rising Franco-Norman influence in the language's history. However, both German and English retain the Proto-Germanic form for ‘man’, which is a much more frequently used term than ‘chair’ and a part of the core vocabulary. This so far appears to be a robust correlation, as words for more frequently used meanings are replaced at a slower rate in core vocabulary [ 15 ] and in numerals [ 17 ], prompting the claim that frequency of usage could provide a cross-linguistic general mechanism for the rate differences in lexical replacement [ 15 ].
An analogous process exists in biological evolution, where highly conserved (slowly evolving) regions of genetic material are generally considered to have increased functional utility in biological processes compared with faster-evolving
In this respect, kin terms behave like core vocabulary: more frequent terms change slower in linguistic evolutionary history. Figure 2 shows the log frequency distribution of our terms across the languages in the sample ( x -axis). The terms themselves are sorted according to their estimated rate of replacement. Mother's (or father's) sister (MZ), which has the highest estimated rate of replacement, is on top. Brother (B), which has the lowest rate, is at the bottom. While the relationship is not uniform, we see that, overall, terms that are used more frequently are also replaced slower across languages. Figure 2.
Inventory size might mediate the ability to detect any frequency–change relationship, and this could be tested if corpora were available for a wider range of languages. We encourage investigations of usage frequency, lexical classes and word evolutionary rates in other language families. On a more general note, historical linguists can find comfort in our results, which provide additional support to the use of the core vocabulary to establish a correlation between frequency of use and rate of replacement. However, these results also indicate that closed semantic classes behave differently and so across-the-board treatments of language change result in a loss of valuable resolution.
evaluate the relative rates of change in the typological and lexical features of Austronesian and Indo-European ... the relative stability of language types over lexical features of those languages , and how far back in ... properties of expressions and languages Linguistic communication, cognition, variation, and change Abstract ...
externalists emergentists essentialists Primary phenomena Actual utterances as produced by language users Facts of social cognition, interaction, and communication Intuitions of grammaticality and literal meaning Primary subject matter Language use; structural properties of expressions and languages Linguistic communication, cognition, variation, and change Abstract universal principles that explain the properties of specific languages Aim To describe attested expression structure and interrelations, and predicting properties of unattested expressions To explain structural properties of languages in terms of general cognitive mechanisms and communicative functions To articulate universal principles and provide explanations for deep and cross-linguistically constant linguistic properties Linguistic structure A system of patterns, inferrable from generally accessible, objective features of language use A system of constructions that range from fixed idiomatic phrases to highly abstract productive types A system of abstract conditions that may not be evident from the experience of typical language users Values Accurate modeling of linguistic form that accords with empirical data and permits prediction concerning unconsidered cases Cognitive, cultural, historical, and evolutionary explanations of phenomena found in linguistic communication systems Highly abstract, covering-law explanations for properties of language as inferred from linguistic intuitions Children’s language A nascent form of language, very different from adult linguistic competence A series of stages in an ontogenetic process of developing adult communicative competence Very similar to adult linguistic competence though obscured by cognitive, articulatory, and lexical limits What is acquired A grasp of the distributional properties of the constituents of expressions of a language A mainly conventional and culturally transmitted system for linguistic communication An internalized generative device that characterizes an infinite set of expressions Table 1.
One particularly influential study, Labov (1966), examines the influence of social class on language variation. Other sociolinguists examine the relation between status within a group on linguistic innovation (Eckert 1989). This interest in variation within languages is characteristic of Emergentist approaches to the study of language. Another kind of Emergentist, like Tomasello (2003), will stress the role of theory of mind and the capacity to use symbols
Bloomfield (1933) showed a strong interest in historical linguistic change (compare (iv)), distinguishing that sharply (much as Saussure did) from synchronic description of language structure ((ii) again) and language use (compare (iii)), arguing that the study of (iv) presupposed (vi).
Second, linguists take an interest in whole topic areas like the internal structure of phrases, the physics of pronunciation, morphological features such as conjugation classes, lexical information about particular words, and so on—topics in which there is typically little philosophical payoff. And third, linguists are concerned with relations between the different subsystems of languages: the exact way the syntax meshes with the semantics, the relationship between phonological and syntactic facts, and so on.
Disagreements between the approaches might be due to the perceived significance of non-human communicative capacities and their relation to uniquely human ones. 5.2 Historical evolution We mentioned earlier that both early 20th-century linguistics monographs and contemporary introductory textbooks include discussions of historical linguistics, i.e., that branch that studies the history and prehistory of changes in particular languages, how they are related to each other, and how and why they change. Again, this topic is distinct from the emergence of language in hominoid species and concerns mostly the linguistic changes that have occurred over a much shorter period within languages.
The last decade has seen two kinds of innovations related to studying changes in particular languages. One, which we will call ‘linguistic phylogeny’, concerns the application of stochastic phylogenetic methods to investigate prehistoric population and language dispersion (Gray and Jordan 2000, Gray 2005, Atkinson and Gray 2006, Gray et al. 2009). These methods answer questions about how members of a family of languages are related to each other and dispersed throughout a geographic area.
For example, Gray and Jordan (2000) used a parsimony analysis of a large language data set to adjudicate between competing hypotheses about the speed of the spread of Austronesian languages through the Pacific. More recently, Greenhill et al. (2010) used a NeighbourNet analysis to evaluate the relative rates of change in the typological and lexical features of Austronesian and Indo-European. These results bear on hypotheses about the relative stability of language types over lexical features of those languages, and how far back in time that stability extends.
If there were highly conserved typological and lexical features, then it might be possible to identify relationships between languages that date beyond the 8000 (plus or minus 2000) year limit that is imposed by lexical instability. 5.2.2 Effects of transmission The computational and laboratory experiments of Kirby and his collaborators have shown that under certain conditions of iterated learning, any given set of signifier/signified pairs in which the mapping is initially arbitrary will change to exhibit a very general kind of compositional structure.
... have a 50 percent chance of being replaced by a non- cognate word in that time . But 28 words ( 14 % ) on the list ... rates of lexical replacement need to be tested against a range of language families . So far such testing has ...
The broad arc of islands north of Australia that extends from Indonesia east towards the central Pacific is home to a set of human populations whose concentration of diversity is unequaled elsewhere. Approximately 20% of the worlds languages are spoken here, and the biological and genetic heterogeneity among the groups is extraordinary. Anthropologist W.W. Howells once declared diversity in the region so Protean as to defy analysis. However, this book can now claim considerable success in describing and understanding the origins of the genetic and linguistic variation there.In order to cut through this biological knot, the authors have applied a comprehensive battery of genetic analyses to an intensively sampled set of populations, and have subjected these and complementary linguistic data
Genes, Language, & Culture History in the Southwest Pacific - Google Buku Telusuri Gambar Maps Play YouTube Berita Gmail Drive Lainnya » Login Buku Koleksiku Bantuan Penelusuran Buku Lanjutan Dapatkan buku cetak eBuku tidak tersedia Oxford University Press BukuKita.com Gramedia Cari di perpustakaan Semua penjual » Genes, Language, & Culture History in the Southwest Pacific Jonathan S. Friedlaender Oxford University Press, USA , 19 Apr 2007 - 248 halaman The broad arc of islands north of Australia that extends from Indonesia east towards the central Pacific is home to a set of human populations whose concentration of diversity is unequaled elsewhere.
Approximately 20% of the worlds languages are spoken here, and the biological and genetic heterogeneity among the groups is extraordinary. Anthropologist W.W. Howells once declared diversity in the region so Protean as to defy analysis. However, this book can now claim considerable success in describing and understanding the origins of the genetic and linguistic variation there.In order to cut through this biological knot, the authors have applied a comprehensive battery of genetic analyses to an intensively sampled set of populations, and have subjected these and complementary linguistic data to a variety of phylogenetic analyses.
The results suggest that a number of commonly used models of evolutionary divergence are overly simple in their assumptions, and that often human diversity has accumulated in very complex ways. Pratinjau buku ini » Halaman terpilih Halaman 37 Halaman 14 Halaman 22 Halaman 74 Halaman 65 Isi Core Studies in Northern Island Melanesia 59 Regional Studies and Conclusion 155 Index 239 Hak Cipta Edisi yang lain - Lihat semua Genes, Language, & Culture History in the Southwest Pacific Jonathan S. Friedlaender Pratinjau terbatas - 2007 Genes, Language, & Culture History in the Southwest Pacific Jonathan S.
Friedlaender Pratinjau terbatas - 2007 Istilah dan frasa umum Aborigines allele Allen An�m Anthropology Archaeology archeological Asian Australia Australian National University Austronesian Austronesian-speaking Baining Bellwood Biology Bismarck Archipelago Bougainville Britain Bulmer Canberra chromosome cultural distribution domesticated East editors evidence Evolution figure frequencies Friedlaender gene flow genetic diversity genome genotypes geographic Golson Gosden groups guages haplogroup haplotypes Highlands Holocene identified Ireland Island Southeast JC virus Journal Kirch Kuot Lapita lineages loci Marambu markers MC1R migration mitochondrial Molecular mtDNA Mussau mutation Northern Island Melanesia obsidian OCA2 Oceanic languages origin Pacific Linguistics Papua New Guinea Papuan languages Papuan-speaking patterns Pawley phylogenetic phylum pigmentation Pleistocene polymorphism Polynesian populations prehistory proto region Remote Oceania Ross samples Sepik sequence settlement skin SNPs Solomon Islands Southeast Asia Southwest Pacific speakers species Spriggs structure subgroups suggests Summerhayes tion Trans New Guinea tree Vanuatu variation virus West New Britain Wurm Y chromosome Tentang pengarang (2007) Jonathan Friedlaender is a Professor Emeritus of Biological Anthropology at Temple University.
Informasi bibliografi Judul Genes, Language, & Culture History in the Southwest Pacific Human Evolution Series , ISSN 1754-5927 Editor Jonathan S. Friedlaender Edisi berilustrasi Penerbit Oxford University Press, USA, 2007 ISBN 0195300300, 9780195300307 Tebal 248 halaman     Ekspor Kutipan BiBTeX EndNote RefMan Tentang Google Buku - Kebijakan Privasi - Persyaratan Layanan - Informasi untuk Penerbit - Laporkan masalah - Bantuan - Beranda Google
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