Changing communicative needs and the structure of the lexicon: corpus-based and experimental approaches
Andres Karjus, CLE, University of Edinburgh
Tuesday, 31.03.2020
11:00 – 11:40
Room: [virtual Zoom talk]
Language change can be driven by a number of things, including social factors, evolutionary learning and communication biases, top-down language planning, or just random drift. In this talk, I will discuss the role of changing communicative needs in lexical change. The corpus-based component focuses on lexical competition and colexification. Here, competition refers to a situation where two or more words compete to be used in the same meaning space. Colexification refers to a word being used to refer to two or more meanings that are or could be otherwise expressed by individual words. I demonstrate how both processes, as well as changes in communicative need, can be detected and measured in diachronic corpora, using language-agnostic, unsupervised lexicostatistical approaches supported by word embeddings. Finally, I will discuss a work in progress artificial language experiment designed to investigate the effects of sense similarity and communicative need on colexification preferences.