Mental Algorithms in the Historical Emergence of Word Meanings
نویسندگان
چکیده
Words frequently acquire new senses, but the mental process that underlies the historical emergence of these senses is often opaque. Many have suggested that word meanings develop in non-arbitrary ways, but no attempt has been made to formalize these proposals and test them against historical data at scale. We propose that word meaning extension should reflect a drive towards cognitive economy. We test this proposal by exploring a family of computational models that predict the evolution of word senses, evaluated against a large digitized lexicon that dates back 1000 years in English language history. Our findings suggest that word meanings not only extend in predictable ways, but also that they do so following an historical path that tends to minimize cognitive cost through a process of nearestneighbor chaining. Our work contributes a formal approach to reverse-engineering mental algorithms of the human lexicon.
منابع مشابه
Meaning of “the Right Imam” based upon the Holy Quran’s Verses
The concept of “the Right Imam” is one of the most significant Quranic concepts and has attracted the attention of various jurisprudential, theological, mystical, interpretative, narrative and historical schools. However, it has not been dealt with by a semantic approach yet. Although the word “Imam” with the meaning of right leader has been used in 5 ranks in the Holy Quran, it could be said t...
متن کاملWord Type Effects on L2 Word Retrieval and Learning: Homonym versus Synonym Vocabulary Instruction
The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to assess the retention of two word types (synonyms and homonyms) in the short term memory, and (b) to investigate the effect of these word types on word learning by asking learners to learn their Persian meanings. A total of 73 Iranian language learners studying English translation participated in the study. For the first purpose, 36 freshmen from an ...
متن کاملSemantics of haq in the Glorious Quran
Meaning plays a very important role at all levels of linguistic analysis and in linguistics. We can say that the word itself and out of the chain of speech doesn’t show the true meaning. It should be in relation with other signs within the language that its meaning be relived. Quran, the precious word of Allah, contains words that take a variety of meanings in the syntactic and topical con...
متن کاملAuto-Organisation and Emergence of Shared Language Structure
The principal goal of attempts to construct computational models of the emergence of language is to shed light on the kinds of processes that may have led to the development of such phenomena as shared lexicons and grammars in the history of the human species. Researchers who attempt to model the emergence of lexicons make a set of shared assumptions about the nature of the problem to be solved...
متن کامل