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....

The study of word classes has a history of over 4000 years, and the word class problem in over 1000 analytic languages like Modern Chinese can be seen as the Goldbach Conjecture in linguistics. This paper first outlines the existing problems in the POS tagging of Modern Chinese corpora with a case study of 自信. Then it introduces the Two-level Word Class Categorization Model in analytic language...

The size and probability distribution of a word-form’s cohort of lexical competitors influence auditory processing and can be constrained by syntactic category information. This experiment employs noun/verb homonyms (e.g. “ache”) presented in syntactic context to clarify the mechanisms and representations involved in context-based cohort restriction. Implications for theories positing single ve...

In this paper, data from a study investigating the acquisition of verb second (V2) word order in a dialect of Norwegian which allows two different word orders in wh-questions (V2 and V3) are used to argue for a cue-based approach to language acquisition and change (Lightfoot 1999). More specifically, it is shown that certain word order patterns that are dependent on information structure are ac...

This paper proposes a novel hierarchical recurrent neural network language model (HRNNLM) for document modeling. After establishing a RNN to capture the coherence between sentences in a document, HRNNLM integrates it as the sentence history information into the word level RNN to predict the word sequence with cross-sentence contextual information. A two-step training approach is designed, in wh...

Within a model of language acquisition and change which recognizes the importance of cues and so-called ‘micro-cues’ in the input (e.g. Lightfoot 1999, 2006, Westergaard 2006, 2007), this paper argues that patterns of information structure may be a factor causing word order change. The examples discussed are taken from mixed grammars which allow two subject or object positions, in both historic...

We examined whether word recognition accuracy and latency of words children encounter during primary school across the upper grades can be predicted from form (word length, mean Levenshtein distance, frequency neighbors), meaning (free association network markers) exposure (corpus contextual diversity). As a measure recognition, 1454 (M = 10.1 years, SD 11.8 months, 52.4% girls) in grade 3, 4 5...