Individuality in complex systems: A constructionist approach

Petré, Peter; Anthonissen, Lynn

doi:10.1515/cog-2019-0033

Cited by 24 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 87 publications

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“…This seems likely to also apply to stylistic change in courtroom discourse, where female attendees would have formed a small minority (Emsley et al, 2018a ). Considering research on innovation and propagation, Peter Petré's pioneering work (Petré and Van de Velde, 2018 ; Petré and Anthonissen, 2020 ) shows how individual variation and diachronic change are related. Petré et al's.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Registerial Adaptation vs. Innovation Across Situational Contexts: 18th Century Women in Transition

Degaetano-Ortlieb

Säily

Bizzoni

2021

Front. Artif. Intell.

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Endeavors to computationally model language variation and change are ever increasing. While analyses of recent diachronic trends are frequently conducted, long-term trends accounting for sociolinguistic variation are less well-studied. Our work sheds light on the temporal dynamics of language use of British 18th century women as a group in transition across two situational contexts. Our findings reveal that in formal contexts women adapt to register conventions, while in informal contexts they act as innovators of change in language use influencing others. While adopted from other disciplines, our methods inform (historical) sociolinguistic work in novel ways. These methods include diachronic periodization by Kullback-Leibler divergence to determine periods of change and relevant features of variation, and event cascades as influencer models.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Registerial Adaptation vs. Innovation Across Situational Contexts: 18th Century Women in Transition

Degaetano-Ortlieb

Säily

Bizzoni

2021

Front. Artif. Intell.

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“…Recent studies on the contribution of individual differences in language change–e.g. by Schmid and Mantlik (2015) ; Baxter and Croft (2016) ; Petré and Van de Velde (2018) ; Anthonissen (2020a) ; Anthonissen (2020b) ; Fonteyn and Nini (2020) ; Petré and Anthonissen (2020) –are accumulating more and more evidence suggesting that especially the early phases of the propagation of innovations are marked by massive variation among speakers, with some using a new element or pattern highly frequently while many contemporary writers do not use it at all ( Schmid 2020 : 320).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since individual speakers are the ultimate carriers of language change, it is not surprising that individual variation has been gaining increasing attention in corpus-based diachronic linguistics. Relevant publications include Gries and Hilpert (2010) ; Schmid and Mantlik (2015) ; Baxter and Croft (2016) ; Petré and Van de Velde (2018) ; Anthonissen (2020a) ; Anthonissen (2020b) ; Petré and Anthonissen (2020) . Work in this tradition tends to be based on the assumption that frequency distributions in the works of individual authors can, under certain circumstances, be interpreted with regard to the writers’ underlying mental representations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

That’s Cool. Computational Sociolinguistic Methods for Investigating Individual Lexico-grammatical Variation

Schmid¹,

Würschinger²,

Fischer

et al. 2021

Front. Artif. Intell.

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The present study deals with variation in the use of lexico-grammatical patterns and emphasizes the need to embrace individual variation. Targeting the pattern that’s adj (as in that’s right, that’s nice or that’s okay) as a case study, we use a tailor-made Python script to systematically retrieve grammatical and semantic information about all instances of this construction in BNC2014 as well as sociolinguistic information enabling us to study social and individual lexico-grammatical variation among speakers who have used this pattern. The dataset amounts to 4,394 tokens produced by 445 speakers using 159 adjective types in 931 conversations. Using detailed descriptive statistics and mixed-effects regression models, we show that while the choice of some adjectives is partly determined by social variables, situational and especially individual variation is rampant overall. Adopting a cognitive-linguistic perspective and relying on the notion of entrenchment, we interpret these findings as reflecting individual speakers' routines. We argue that computational sociolinguistics is in an ideal position to contribute to the data-driven investigation of individual lexico-grammatical variation and encourage computational sociolinguists to grab this opportunity. For the routines of individual speakers ultimately both underlie and compromise systematic social variation and trigger and steer well-known types of language change including grammaticalization, pragmaticalization and change by invited inference.

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“…By contrast, objective complexity is usually studied at the level of individual languages (or grammatical domains of individual languages) and regularly compared across languages (i.e., across speech communities), but not examined at the level of the individual speaker. We know from a few studies that there are individual differences in our linguistic abilities (e.g., Chipere, 2009;Dabrowska, 2015a;Petré and Anthonissen, 2020). These differences between specific speakers and their grammars could, in principle, be examined at the ontological level by counting parts of their language systems or by quantifying the transparency of the constructions that they use.…”

Section: Studying Variation Vs Studying Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Complexity and Its Relation to Variation

Forker¹

2021

Front. Commun.

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This paper is concerned with the relationship between complexity and variation. The main goal is to lay out the conceptual foundations and to develop and systematize reasonable hypotheses such as to set out concrete research questions for future investigations. I first compare how complexity and variation have synchronically been studied and what kinds of questions have been asked in those studies. Departing from earlier surveys of different definitions of complexity, here I classify the majority of complexity studies into two broad types based on two ways of defining this concept. The first type determines and measures linguistic complexity by counting numbers of items (e.g., linguistic forms or rules and interactions between forms). The second type makes use of transparency and the principle of One-Meaning–One-Form. In addition, linguistic complexity has been defined by means of concepts from information theory, namely in terms of description length or information content, but those studies are in the minority. Then I define linguistic variation as a situation when two or more linguistic forms have identical or largely identical meaning and it is possible to use either the one or the other variant. Variation can be free or linguistically or socially conditioned. I argue that there is an implicational relationship between complexity of the first type that is defined in terms of numbers of items and variation. Variation is a type of complexity because it implies the existence of more than one linguistic form per meaning. But not every type of complexity involves variation because complexity defined on the basis of transparency does not necessarily imply the existence of more than one form. In the following I discuss extralinguistic factors that (possibly) have an impact on socially conditioned variation and/or complexity and can lead to an increase or decrease of complexity and/or variation. I conclude with suggestions of how to further examine the relationship between complexity and variation.

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Individuality in complex systems: A constructionist approach

Cited by 24 publications

References 87 publications

Registerial Adaptation vs. Innovation Across Situational Contexts: 18th Century Women in Transition

Registerial Adaptation vs. Innovation Across Situational Contexts: 18th Century Women in Transition

That’s Cool. Computational Sociolinguistic Methods for Investigating Individual Lexico-grammatical Variation

Complexity and Its Relation to Variation

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