Evolution of Homophones and Syntactic Categories Noun and Verb

Abstract

We examine the neural substrates of comprehension of the bisyllabic homophones in English and Japanese. The evolution of homophones is a result of interaction between the speaker's production and the listener's perception, and the cortical representation of speech does not merely reflect the external acoustic environment. We further demonstrate that noun and verb categories are represented in different neural substrates in English, while both categories are processed in the same anatomical area in Japanese. We suggest that nouns and verbs are originally processed in the same anatomical area of the brain when the basic word order is SOV, and discourse organization is closely interwoven with syntactic organization as shown in Old English and Japanese. When the SOV order is changed to SVO through embedding, a strictly syntactic organization of the clause appears. The noun/verb distinction is clearly visible in the positions that nouns and verbs occupy in sentences, and it is represented in different neural substrates in the brain as shown in Present-day English.

Comparative Reconstruction Probabilistically: The Role of Inventory and Phonotactics

“…Firstly, there is some evidence of between-word homophony avoidance in diachronic linguistics (Ogura & Wang, 2018;Silverman, 2009). Both computational modelling (Blevins & Wedel, 2009;Winter & Wedel, 2016) and language learning experiments (Yin & White, 2018) confirm that errors in language transmission tend to result in greater contrast between different word pairs.…”

Homophony avoidance in the grammar: Russian nominal allomorphy

“…Based on the results from the corpus study as well as previous findings (Baerman 2010, Bethin 2012, Kaplan & Muratani 2015, Pertsova 2015), the domain of homophony avoidance, and therefore the comparison set, appears to be the morphological paradigm. However, note that evidence in favour of broader, between-word homophony avoidance effects exists as well (Silverman 2009, Ogura & Wang 2018). For the purposes of this study, the comparison set will be limited to all forms in the morphological paradigm of the input.…”