Abstract
AbstractWe adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic factors—semantic, distributional, and phonological—that we hypothesize are predictive of lexical decline, in which words greatly decrease in frequency over time. Using historical data across three languages (English, French, and German), we find that most of our proposed factors show a significant difference in the expected direction between each curated set of declining words and their matched stable words. Moreover, logistic regression analyses show that semantic and distributional factors are significant in predicting declining words. Further diachronic analysis reveals that declining words tend to decrease in the diversity of their lexical contexts over time, gradually narrowing their ‘ecological niches’.
Highlights
Many researchers, from Schleicher (1863) up to the present (Croft, 2000; Oudeyer and Kaplan, 2007; Atkinson et al, 2008; Thanukos, 2008; Turney and Mohammad, 2019), have drawn analogies between biological evolution and the evolution of languages — their structure, their semantics, and their lexicons
The carefully curated sets of declining and stable words facilitate rigorous analysis of the factors that we hypothesize are predictive of lexical decline
We assess the difference in the defined predictors across the two sets of declining and stable words in each language, by applying statistical significance tests on individual factor values
Summary
From Schleicher (1863) up to the present (Croft, 2000; Oudeyer and Kaplan, 2007; Atkinson et al, 2008; Thanukos, 2008; Turney and Mohammad, 2019), have drawn analogies between biological evolution and the evolution of languages — their structure, their semantics, and their lexicons. As Schleicher first pointed out, diachrony can be viewed as a struggle for survival by individual words whose propagation into future generations is contingent on their continued fitness for one or more niches in the ecology of the speech community — as determined by a host of factors. Social factors clearly play a role, as changes in culture and technology may lead words to fall in and out of use. Words that are semantically similar to many other words may come to be used less because of intense competition in the cognitive process of lexical access (Chen and Mirman, 2012). We suggest that semantic, distributional, and phonological factors all play a role in the natural selection of words
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