Patterns of Persistence and Diffusibility across the World's Languages
CoRR(2024)
摘要
Language similarities can be caused by genetic relatedness, areal contact,
universality, or chance. Colexification, i.e. a type of similarity where a
single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings, is underexplored. In
our work, we shed light on the linguistic causes of cross-lingual similarity in
colexification and phonology, by exploring genealogical stability (persistence)
and contact-induced change (diffusibility). We construct large-scale graphs
incorporating semantic, genealogical, phonological and geographical data for
1,966 languages. We then show the potential of this resource, by investigating
several established hypotheses from previous work in linguistics, while
proposing new ones. Our results strongly support a previously established
hypothesis in the linguistic literature, while offering contradicting evidence
to another. Our large scale resource opens for further research across
disciplines, e.g. in multilingual NLP and comparative linguistics.
更多查看译文
AI 理解论文
溯源树
样例
生成溯源树,研究论文发展脉络
Chat Paper
正在生成论文摘要