Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws

Abstract

New dialect emergence and focusing in language contact settings is difficult to capture and date in terms of global structural dialect stabilization. This paper explores whether diachronic power law frequency distributions can provide evidence of dialect evolution and new dialect focusing, by considering the quantitative frequency characteristics of three diachronic Indian English (IE) corpora (1970s-2008). The results demonstrate that IE consistently follows power law frequency distributions and the corpora are each best fit by Mandelbrot's Law. Diachronic changes in the constants are interpreted as evidence of lexical and syntactic collocational focusing within the process of new dialect formation. Evidence of new dialect focusing is also visible through apparent time comparison of spoken and written data. Age and gender-separated sub-corpora of the most recent corpus show minimal deviation, providing apparent time evidence for emerging IE dialect stability. From these findings, we extend the interpretation of diachronic changes in the β coefficient-as indicative of changes in the degree of synthetic/analytic structure-so that β is also sensitive to grammaticalization and changes in collocational patterns.

Shared neural and cognitive mechanisms in action and language: The multiscale information transfer framework

“…For example, is there a principled trade‐off between scales such that (spoken or signed) languages exhibiting relatively low entropy at low hierarchical scales (e.g., morphology) exhibit higher entropy at some higher scale (e.g., syntax) and vice versa? Does the relative informativity of different scales vary as a function of language change (Bentz, Kiela, Hill, & Buttery, ; Chand, Kapper, Mondal, Sur, & Parshad, )? Determining which of the abovementioned information transfer metrics is best‐suited to predict behavior and online processing of language, and whether the predictivity of metrics depends on the scale and language under consideration. Exploring the extent to which information extraction from signal streams in different modalities critically relies on the same brain circuits. This could, for example, be achieved via transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies exploring whether disrupting information extraction at a given hierarchical scale has analogous processing effects across different modalities (e.g., the processing of motor event schemas vs. linguistic schemas). Investigating the relationship between the cognitive capabilities put to use in information processing (e.g., segmentation and hierarchical structuring) and other cognitive processes.…”

Zipf’s laws of meaning in Catalan

“…Following [ 53 ] the α exponent of Zipf’s rank-frequency law “reflects changes in morphological marking” [ 53 ], so that more inflection is correlated to a higher α and longer tail of hapax legomena [ 22 , 53 ]. Comparing modalities, in our case orality shows a lower α than writing, contrary to [ 53 ] but consider that here we follow different methods.…”

“…Following [ 53 ] the α exponent of Zipf’s rank-frequency law “reflects changes in morphological marking” [ 53 ], so that more inflection is correlated to a higher α and longer tail of hapax legomena [ 22 , 53 ]. Comparing modalities, in our case orality shows a lower α than writing, contrary to [ 53 ] but consider that here we follow different methods. Besides, it has been shown that there is variability in α related to both the text genre and the linguistic typology for languages of different linguistic families [ 51 ].…”