Title: Self-organization and Language Evolution: System, Population and Individual
1Self-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
2Outline
- 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
3Self-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)
4Classic caseBénard Instability
5Common properties
- Emergence
- Multistability
- Phase transition
6Background of homophony
- Concept
- The rise of homophony
- The fall of homophony
- The exaptive usage
7What 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
8The 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)
9The rise of homophonyfrom borrowing
- English
- sheik from Arabic shaikh
- chic from French
- Chinese
- ?(ku4) the meaning good, cool is from English
cool
10The 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)
11The 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.
12The 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.
13Cross-language comparison of degree of homophony
- Difficulties to shoot
- Degree of homophony in Chinese dialects
- Degree of homophony in three Germanic languages
14Cross-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.
15Degrees of homophony in Chinese dialects
16(No Transcript)
17Degrees of homophony in three Germanic languages
18Degrees of homophony in three Germanic languages
19Homophony and phonological resource
- Phonological resource
- Predict the degree of homophony for a language
20Measuring 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)
21Measuring 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
22Prediction 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
23Prediction of the degree of homophony
- And here is the second hypothesis he proposed,
which seems more valid from the data in the
paper.
24Self-organization in homophony
- Disyllabification in Chinese
- Measure of degree of disyllabification
- Disyllabification and homophony avoidance
- Grammatical differentiation between homophones
25Self-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
26Disyllabification 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)
27Disyllabification 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.
28Grammatical 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.
29Self-organization in the lexicon Monosyllabicity
and lexicalization
- There is the self-organization characteristics
for the evolution of the lexicon according to
monosyllabicity and lexicalization.
30Questions
31Thanks!