Development of Gender Classifications: Modeling the Historical Change from Latin to French

Abstract

We present and analyze the results of a connectionist simulation which modeled the reanalysis of the Latin gender system in its transition to Old French. The network reanalysis was based solely on formal cues (word endings and analogy with other words) and on frequency. The results are in accordance with the historical data, and certain errors in simulations are also amenable to principled explanations. Simulations improve dramatically when the networks incorporate information about the Celtic substrate which presumably interfered with gender assignment in Gallo-Romance. This finding has a bearing on issues of gender assignment and processing in bilinguals. Simulations also improve with the introduction of more elaborate recurrent networks, which suggests implications for future connectionist modeling. In particular, the results could be applied to the modeling of gender change in other Romance languages and to the modeling of comparative Romance gender systems. The method proposed here would be advantageous for such simulations since it allows the modeler to take into account a rich variety of facts reflecting actual linguistic history.

Language type frequency and learnability from a connectionist perspective

“…The learners fail to acquire the more infrequent and/or unusual forms provided to them in their language input and end up replacing them with forms which follow the main patterns in the language more closely. That such a learning mechanism can indeed lead to linguistically plausible results has been demonstrated by connectionist models of the historical changes in the past tense system of Old English (Hare & Elman 1995), as well as the nominal system of Vulgar Latin (Polinsky & Van Everbroeck 2003).…”

Linguistic Adaptation at Work? The Change of Word Order and Case System From Latin to the Romance Languages

“…Past work investigating how cognitive constraints may shape language change has primarily focused either on limitations on learning (e.g., Polinksy & Van Everbroeck, 2003) or parsing (e.g., Hawkins, 2004). Because comprehension can typically be accomplished by integrating partial information, whereas production requires specifying the complete utterance, we suggest that the latter may cause more problems for L2 learners and therefore become a factor in the shaping of languages with many non-native speakers..…”

Gender typology

“…This has been successfully implemented; for details of a formal model of this system see Evans, Brown and Corbett (2002). However, there is also interesting work on modeling the development of assignment systems over time, as in Polinsky and van Everbroeck (2003). However, there is also interesting work on modeling the development of assignment systems over time, as in Polinsky and van Everbroeck (2003).…”