Is Modern English becoming less inflectionally diversified? Evidence from entropy-based algorithm

Abstract

Researchers have long noticed the phenomenon of inflection decay in the evolution of English, which may be driven by the Principle of Least Effort (Millward and Hayes, 2010; Zipf, 1949). However, most studies in this line of research were based on exemplar-oriented observations while few explored the phenomenon from a quantitative perspective. In addition, it remains unclear whether the trend of inflection decay has continued in Modern English. In the present study, an index named Inflectional Entropy was developed to measure the diachronic change of the inflectional trend of Modern English in the 20th century. A trend of inflection decay in Modern English was found based on experiments on several large-scale corpora. The findings provide quantitative evidence to linguistic theories such as Principle of Least Effort, Language Niche Hypothesis (Lupyan and Dale, 2010), and Principle of Entropy Minimization (Ferrer-i-Cancho, 2018).