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Evolution of grammatical forms: some quantitative approaches

  • Regular Article - Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
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Abstract

Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the ‘descent’ mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages, and the ‘contact’ mechanism, where evolution in a given language occurs via borrowing from other languages with which it is in contact. We use ideas and concepts from statistical physics to formulate a series of static and dynamical models which illustrate these issues in general terms. The static models emphasise the relative numbers of rules and exceptions, while the dynamical models focus on the emergence of exceptional forms. These unlikely survivors among various competing grammatical forms are winners against the odds. Our analysis suggests that they emerge when the influence of neighbouring languages exceeds the generic tendency towards regularisation within individual languages.

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Notes

  1. In contrast, such concepts have been used in other areas of language dynamics, such as the coexistence of two or more languages in a given geographical area [4].

  2. This number will be used as an effective measure of ‘time’. In this work, we never directly compare real (i.e. historical) time to the effective time variables parametrising the evolution in all our models.

  3. This term, meaning ‘union of languages’ refers to a situation where there is prolonged contact across geographically contiguous language communities [3].

  4. The impurity state (52) of the pristine case described above fits within this scheme, with \(\gamma _1=-\ln z\) and \(\gamma _2\rightarrow 0\).

  5. The important difference is that all survivors were considered in [25], whereas here only the subset of survivors against the odds is considered. The same reasoning though clearly applies to both.

  6. We mention for completeness that the present work has only little to do with the theory of Anderson localisation on the Bethe lattice [36], which plays a major role in recent work on many-body localisation (see e.g. [37,38,39]). There, the Bethe lattice arises as a template for the Fock space of a quantum many-body problem.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge with thanks discussions and exchanges with Aurélia Elalouf, Guillaume Jacques and Mattis List, which introduced us to the rich fields of historical linguistics and contact linguistics. AM warmly thanks the Leverhulme Trust for the Visiting Professorship that funded part of this research, as well as the Faculty of Linguistics, Philosophy and Phonetics, Oxford and the Institut de Physique Théorique, Saclay, for their hospitality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut de Physique Théorique, Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS and CEA, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Jean-Marc Luck

  2. Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, Clarendon Institute, Walton Street, Oxford, OX1 2HG, UK

    Anita Mehta

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  1. Jean-Marc Luck
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Both authors contributed equally to the present work, were equally involved in the preparation of the manuscript, and have read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jean-Marc Luck.

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Luck, JM., Mehta, A. Evolution of grammatical forms: some quantitative approaches. Eur. Phys. J. B 96, 19 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/s10051-023-00488-0

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