For more than 25 years, ever since I was exposed to Latin in high school and then to Ancient Greek while an undergraduate at Yale, I have been fascinated by language and more particularly by the ancient languages of the wide-ranging group of languages known as the Indo-European family (to which English, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian, Hindi, etc. all belong). This early enthusiasm deepene...

The approach of ordinal mind change complexity, introduced by Freivalds and Smith, uses (notations for) constructive ordinals to bound the number of mind changes made by a learning machine. This approach provides a measure of the extent to which a learning machine has to keep revising its estimate of the number of mind changes it will make before converging to a correct hypothesis for languages...

My objectives are several: I want to clarify what ethnicity means and what it does not meancannot mean; I want to clarify the relationship, if any, between language and ethnicity, from the viewpoint of a sociologist who views language as a component of culture and not of a linguist or sociolinguist whose primary focus is language itself; and I want to consider how it is that bidialectism or bil...

The use of mobile phones and other portable devices is beginning to have an impact on how learning takes place in many disciplines and contexts, including language learning. Learners who are not dependent on access to fixed computers can engage in activities that relate more closely to their current surroundings, sometimes crossing the border between formal and informal learning. This creates t...

In this paper, I distinguish different kinds of pluralism about logical consequence. In particular, I distinguish the pluralism about logic arising from Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance from a pluralism which maintains that there are different, equally “good” logical consequence relations on the one language. I will argue that this second form of pluralism does more justice to the contemporary s...

Model transformations are a key component in Model Driven Development, but most approaches only allow ‘one shot’ transformations to be expressed. Change propagating model transformations are those which can make suitable updates to models after an initial transformation. In this paper I outline the challenges presented by change propagating model transformations, before presenting a new change ...

In this paper we propose a hybrid multi-agent modelling framework which facilitates investigation into sound change by combining the sociophonetic model of Nettle [14] and the exemplarbased model of Wedel [21] into a single unified model. The framework facilitates simulation scenarios of different social networks with varying interaction schemes and social distances between the agents. Addition...

The present chapter discusses Optimality-Theoretic approaches to language change in Spanish, reviewing a number of works that invoke not only the interaction of faithfulness and markedness constraints, but also the role of perceptual, cognitive, systemic and external influences on linguistic structure and change at the level of segment and segmental inventory, syllableand prosodic structure, an...

This essay examines language change and linguistic creativity as revealed by remodelling, especially as a source for euphemisms and euphemistic dysphemisms and as a function of verbal play. Within the scope of this essay, there are predominantly two ways in which novel terms and expressions are created leading to language change: formally through remodelling and semantically through figurative ...

If every productive form of linguistic expression can be described by some idealized human grammar, an individuals’s variable linguistic behavior (Weinreich, Labov, & Herzog, 1968) can be modeled as a statistical distribution of multiple idealized grammars. The distribution of grammars is determined by the interaction between the biological constraints on human grammar and the properties of lin...