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Title: Self-organization and Language Evolution: System, Population and Individual


1
Self-organization and Language Evolution
System, Population and Individual
  • Self-organization in the system A case study on
    homophony

By Jinyun Ke
Presented by Zhengbo Zhou
2
Outline
  • Some words on self-organization
  • Some words on homophony
  • Cross-language comparison of the degree of
    homophony
  • Homophony and phonological resource
  • Self-organization in homophony
  • Self-organization in lexicon

3
Self-organization
  • Self-organization is a process in which the
    internal organization of a system, normally an
    open system, increases in complexity without
    being guided or managed by an outside source.
    Self-organizing systems typically (though not
    always) display emergent properties Wikipedia
  • This is similar as what the author cited in the
    paper (p19)

4
Classic caseBénard Instability

5
Common properties
  • Emergence
  • Multistability
  • Phase transition

6
Background of homophony
  • Concept
  • The rise of homophony
  • The fall of homophony
  • The exaptive usage

7
What is homophony
  • I believe everybody here knows this term ?
  • Two or more words having the same sound but
    differing in meaning or derivation OED
  • Example( a lot )
  • ??(reason)??(vowel)(yuan2yin1)
  • sitesightcite

8
The rise of homophonyfrom sound change
  • Most of homophones arise as a result of
    phonological merger.
  • Englishgreat vowel shift
  • meat (mate sound in Middle English)
  • Chinesesound change
  • Some southern dialects keep some features of
    ancient Chinese phonetic characteristic
    (Cantonese)

9
The rise of homophonyfrom borrowing
  • English
  • sheik from Arabic shaikh
  • chic from French
  • Chinese
  • ?(ku4) the meaning good, cool is from English
    cool

10
The fall of homophonysplit from sound change
  • Homophones rarely split
  • Often explained as borrowing or analogy
  • Chinesetaboo interference through history
    (name of holy things, name of the emperor, name
    of government position etc)

11
The fall of homophonyreplaced by synonyms
  • Replaced by synonyms
  • gallus (rooster) vs gattus (cat)
  • When l became t, rooster was replaced by
    synonyms
  • Replaced by borrowed synonyms
  • Harurai in Papua New Guinea.

12
The exaptive usage of homophony
  • Chinese special idioms using homophony
  • ???(xie1hou4yu3)two parts in an idiom, like a
    riddle, and the homophones appear mostly in the
    second part (the answer of the riddle), usually
    has two level of meanings
  • ????-??(?)??
  • He2shang4da3san3-wu2fa3wu2tian1
  • A monk with an open umbrella over his head,
  • He doesnt have hair and he cannot see the sky-
  • (somebody) is not constrained by the law or the
    Heaven.

13
Cross-language comparison of degree of homophony
  • Difficulties to shoot
  • Degree of homophony in Chinese dialects
  • Degree of homophony in three Germanic languages

14
Cross-language comparison of degree of homophony
  • How to compare between or among languages about
    their degree of homophony
  • Tackling the dataset a set of Chinese dialects
    and large database of words for three Germanic
    languages
  • Polyseme pruning to get rid of words with same
    meaning but different POS usage.

15
Degrees of homophony in Chinese dialects
16
(No Transcript)
17
Degrees of homophony in three Germanic languages
18
Degrees of homophony in three Germanic languages
19
Homophony and phonological resource
  • Phonological resource
  • Predict the degree of homophony for a language

20
Measuring phonological resource
  • Phonological resource refers to the number of
    possible distinctive forms a language can make
    use of to construct words or represent morphemes
  • Combination of consonants and vowels to form
    syllables and concatenating the syllables.
  • Examples
  • English CCCVCCC scripts
  • Dutch CCCVCCCC abstractst
  • German CCCVCCCC strolchst
  • Chinese CGVN liang CV ta (smaller segment
    size)

21
Measuring phonological resource
  • The number of segments and the types of canonical
    forms may provide a measure for phonological
    resource
  • Measure of the exploitation rate of phonological
    resource by examining CV combination only

22
Prediction of the degree of homophony
  • The hypothesis is very straightforward and also
    can be applied very well on Chinese (although
    there is some controversy on the wordness of
    Chinese). However, the author argues that it is
    invalid to use Hypothesis I to predict the degree
    of homophony in a language.
  • Author Due to the difficulty of obtaining a
    representative index of the size of phonological
    resource, it does not seem to be a good approach
    to predict the degree of homophony based on this
    parameter. And

23
Prediction of the degree of homophony
  • And here is the second hypothesis he proposed,
    which seems more valid from the data in the
    paper.

24
Self-organization in homophony
  • Disyllabification in Chinese
  • Measure of degree of disyllabification
  • Disyllabification and homophony avoidance
  • Grammatical differentiation between homophones

25
Self-organization comes
  • So, from above, more monosyllabic words means
    more homophones, which may affect communication
    negatively. From self-organization point of
    view, there should be an emergence process to
    organize the system. So does the
    disyllabification avoid homophony?
  • Take Chinese as the study case

26
Disyllabification in Chinese--Measure of degree
of disyllabification
  • In modern Chinese monosyllabic words are only in
    a small portion, about 29 in the frequent list
    of Putonghua (mandarin)
  • The percentage of disyllabic words is estimated
    by counting the proportion of real words among
    the 500 most highly associated character pairs
    generated from a given sample of texts. Sproat
    (2002)

27
Disyllabification in ChineseDisyllabification
and homophony avoidance
  • Homophony avoidance is the mechanism at the
    initial stage for disyllabification through the
    Chinese evolution history
  • The homophony avoidance hypothesis would predict
    the following correlations a smaller
    phonological inventory implies a larger degree of
    homophony in monosyllabic morphemes, and
    consequently a larger degree of disyllabification.

28
Grammatical differentiation between homophones
  • A pair of homophones sharing the same grammatical
    class are more likely to cause confusion than
    words belonging to different grammatical classes.

29
Self-organization in the lexicon Monosyllabicity
and lexicalization
  • There is the self-organization characteristics
    for the evolution of the lexicon according to
    monosyllabicity and lexicalization.

30
Questions
31
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