Studying standard language dynamics in Europe

Studying Language Change Using Price Equation and Pólya-urn Dynamics

Language change takes place primarily via diffusion of linguistic variants in a population of individuals. Identifying selective pressures on this process is important not only to construe and predict changes, but also to inform theories of evolutionary dynamics of socio-cultural factors. In this paper, we advocate the Price equation from evolutionary biology and the Pólya-urn dynamics from con...

Standard drink measures in Europe

A MODEL FOR EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS OF WORDS IN A LANGUAGE

Human language, over its evolutionary history, has emerged as one of the fundamental defining characteristic of the modern man. However, this milestone evolutionary process through natural selection has not left any ’linguistic fossils’ that may enable us to trace back the actual course of development of language and its establishment in human societies. Lacking analytical tools to fathom the cr...

Studying Literature as Language

For the past twenty-five years or so, there has been a running dispute between literary critics and linguists on the question of whether it is appropriate to apply linguistic methods -that is to say, methods derived from the discipline of linguisticsto the study of l i terature. There has been almost universal confidence among the linguistis that this activity is entirely justified; and almost ...

Language Resources for Studying Argument

This paper describes the development of a written corpus of argumentative reasoning. Arguments in the corpus have been analysed using state of the art techniques from argumentation theory and have been marked up using an open, reusable markup language. A number of the key challenges enountered during the process are explored, and preliminary observations about features such as intercoder reliab...