Adaptive Languages
eBook - ePub

Adaptive Languages

An Information-Theoretic Account of Linguistic Diversity

  1. 233 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Adaptive Languages

An Information-Theoretic Account of Linguistic Diversity

Book details
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Languages carry information. To fulfil this purpose, they employ a multitude of coding strategies. This book explores a core property of linguistic coding – called lexical diversity. Parallel text corpora of overall more than 1800 texts written in more than 1200 languages are the basis for computational analyses. Different measures of lexical diversity are discussed and tested, and Shannon's measure of uncertainty – the entropy – is chosen to assess differences in the distributions of words. To further explain this variation, a range of descriptive, explanatory, and grouping factors are considered in a series of statistical models. The first category includes writing systems, word-formation patterns, registers and styles. The second category includes population size, non-native speaker proportions and language status. Grouping factors further elicit whether the results extrapolate across – or are limited to – specific language families and areas. This account marries information-theoretic methods with a complex systems framework, illustrating how languages adapt to the varying needs of their users. It sheds light on the puzzling diversity of human languages in a quantitative, data driven and reproducible manner.

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Yes, you can access Adaptive Languages by Christian Bentz in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Filología & Lingüística. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
De Gruyter Mouton
Year
2018
ISBN
9783110557770
Edition
1
Topic
Filología
Subtopic
Lingüística

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Preface
  6. Contents
  7. Abbreviations
  8. List of Tables
  9. List of Figures
  10. 1 Introduction
  11. 2 Languages as Adaptive Systems
  12. 3 Language Change and Population Structure
  13. Chapter 4
  14. 5 Descriptive Factors: Language “Internal” Effects
  15. 6 Explanatory Factors: Language “External” Effects
  16. 7 Grouping Factors: Language Families and Areas
  17. 8 Predicting Lexical Diversity: Statistical Models
  18. 9 Explaining Diversity: Multiple Factors Interacting
  19. 10 Further Problems and Caveats
  20. 11 Conclusions: Universality and Diversity
  21. 12 Appendix A: Advanced Entropy Estimators
  22. 13 Appendix B: Multiple Regression Assumptions
  23. 14 Appendix C: Mixed-effects Regression Assumptions
  24. Bibliography
  25. Index