Gradual Modifications and Abrupt Replacements: Two Stochastic Lexical Ingredients of Language Evolution
The evolution of the vocabulary of a language is characterized by two different random processes: abrupt lexical replacements, when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept (which was at the basis of the Swadesh foundation of glottochronology in the 1950s), and gradual lexical modifi...
Main Authors: | , , |
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
The MIT Press
2023-06-01
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Series: | Computational Linguistics |
Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00471 |