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      Internal and External Dynamics in Language: Evidence from Verb Regularity in a Historical Corpus of English

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          Abstract

          Human languages are rule governed, but almost invariably these rules have exceptions in the form of irregularities. Since rules in language are efficient and productive, the persistence of irregularity is an anomaly. How does irregularity linger in the face of internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous) pressures to conform to a rule? Here we address this problem by taking a detailed look at simple past tense verbs in the Corpus of Historical American English. The data show that the language is open, with many new verbs entering. At the same time, existing verbs might tend to regularize or irregularize as a consequence of internal dynamics, but overall, the amount of irregularity sustained by the language stays roughly constant over time. Despite continuous vocabulary growth, and presumably, an attendant increase in expressive power, there is no corresponding growth in irregularity. We analyze the set of irregulars, showing they may adhere to a set of minority rules, allowing for increased stability of irregularity over time. These findings contribute to the debate on how language systems become rule governed, and how and why they sustain exceptions to rules, providing insight into the interplay between the emergence and maintenance of rules and exceptions in language.

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          Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books.

          We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of 'culturomics,' focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.
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            Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure

            Background Languages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that language grammars are unrelated to social environments in which they are learned and used. Methodology/Principal Findings We conducted a statistical analysis of >2,000 languages using a combination of demographic sources and the World Atlas of Language Structures— a database of structural language properties. We found strong relationships between linguistic factors related to morphological complexity, and demographic/socio-historical factors such as the number of language users, geographic spread, and degree of language contact. The analyses suggest that languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than languages spoken by smaller groups as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality, negation, aspect, and possession. Our findings indicate that just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. As adults learn a language, features that are difficult for them to acquire, are less likely to be passed on to subsequent learners. Languages used for communication in large groups that include adult learners appear to have been subjected to such selection. Conversely, the morphological complexity common to languages used in small groups increases redundancy which may facilitate language learning by infants. Conclusions/Significance We hypothesize that language structures are subjected to different evolutionary pressures in different social environments. Just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. The proposed Linguistic Niche Hypothesis has implications for answering the broad question of why languages differ in the way they do and makes empirical predictions regarding language acquisition capacities of children versus adults.
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              Phonology and Language Use

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2014
                1 August 2014
                : 9
                : 8
                : e102882
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Institute for Complex Systems (ISC-CNR), Roma, Italy
                [2 ]Sapienza University of Rome, Physics Department, Roma, Italy
                [3 ]Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Torino, Italy
                University of Maribor, Slovenia
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: CFC MP VL CC FC FT. Performed the experiments: CFC MP. Analyzed the data: CFC MP FC. Contributed to the writing of the manuscript: CFC MP VL CC FC FT.

                Article
                PONE-D-14-21313
                10.1371/journal.pone.0102882
                4118841
                25084006
                e83073e6-cd37-4d25-9131-5c4405236770
                Copyright @ 2014

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 13 May 2014
                : 24 June 2014
                Page count
                Pages: 7
                Funding
                This work was supported by the European Science Foundation as part of the DRUST project, a EUROCORES EuroUnderstanding programme. http://www.esf.org/coordinating-research/eurocores/running-programmes/eurounderstanding.html http://www.eurounderstanding.eu. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Physical Sciences
                Physics
                Interdisciplinary Physics
                Statistical Mechanics
                Social Sciences
                Linguistics
                Cognitive Linguistics
                Historical Linguistics
                Linguistic Morphology
                Phonology
                Sociolinguistics
                Psychology
                Cognitive Psychology
                Language
                Custom metadata
                The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. Data are available as part of a series of corpora curated by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, and can be accessed freely at http://corpus.byu.edu. Annotated data are provided in S5 (verbs) and S6 (roots).

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