Frequency, stability, and regularity in language evolution
Christine Cuskley (Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh)
Tuesday 29 January
11:30am -12:30pm
G.32, 7 George Square
Highly frequent linguistic units are more stable over time: for example, highly frequent words are more robust against change than lower frequency words. This trend has a functional explanation: forms with high usage frequency are less free to vary because this is more likely to cause communicative failure. This is analogous to the dynamics of purifying and stabilizing selection in biology. Traits with acute survival relevance show strong selection against deleterious alleles (purifying selection), resulting in less variation across the population. This talk will focus on analogous frequency-stability dynamics in language using agent based models, and some experiments which examine (ir)regularisation behaviours in native and non-native speakers of English. Stability in linguistic form across a population is favoured particularly for high frequency meanings, but that the strength of this effect is mediated by dynamic properties of the population.