In this paper I present and update some of the major points Russell Schuh and I made in our 1974 Linguistic Inquiry paper concerning universals of tone rules. Emphasis is on the distinction we made between synchronic and diachronic naturalness. Any diachronic change can be a synchronic rule while the reserve is not the case. We suggest(ed) that it is profitable to talk about natural synchronic ...

A growing body of evidence shows that cognitive processes in general, and causal cognition in particular, are variable across cultures (Choi et al., 1999; Norenzayan and Heine, 2005; Henrich et al., 2010). The majority of these findings are based on cross-cultural comparisons contrasting well-defined groups, with little explicit consideration of temporal change within those groups. While this s...

The vast majority of the work on culture and cognition has focused on cross-cultural comparisons, largely ignoring the dynamic aspects of culture. In this article, we provide a diachronic analysis of causal cognition over time. We hypothesized that the increased role of education, science, and technology in Western societies should be accompanied by greater attention to causal connections. To t...

Blevins’s Evolutionary Phonology attempts to derive most if not all synchronic phonological patterns from diachronic changes: “[R]ecurrent synchronic sound patterns are a direct reflection of their diachronic origins, and, more specifically...regular phonetically based sound change is the common source of recurrent sound patterns. Evolutionary Phonology...investigates this hypothesis and explor...

In this paper, a method for measuring synchronic corpus (dis-)similarity put forward by Kilgarriff (2001) is adapted and extended to identify trends and correlated changes in diachronic text data, using the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2010a) and the Google Ngram Corpora (Michel et al. 2010a). This paper shows that this fully data-driven method, which extracts word types that h...

We are going to explain partial blocking as the result of diachronic processes based on what will be call associative learning. Especially, we argue that the task posed by partial blocking phenomena is to explain their emergence from unambiguous and fully expressive languages. This contrasts with approaches that presuppose underspecified semantic meanings or ineffability like Bi–OT and some Gam...

In this paper, we argue that comparable collections of historical written resources can help overcoming typical challenges posed by heritage texts enhancing spelling normalization, POS-tagging and subsequent diachronic linguistic analyses. Thus, we present a comparable corpus of historical German recipes and show how such a comparable text collection together with the application of innovative ...

Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words missed by Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) systems can be recovered with the help of topic and semantic context of the OOV words captured from a diachronic text corpus. In this paper we investigate how the choice of documents for the diachronic text corpora affects the retrieval of OOV Proper Names (PNs) relevant to an audio document. We first...

Recent advances in distributional semantics combined with the availability of large-scale diachronic corpora offer new research avenues for the Digital Humanities. JESEME, the Jena Semantic Explorer, renders assistance to a non-technical audience to investigate diachronic semantic topics. JESEME runs as a website with query options and interactive visualizations of results, as well as a REST AP...

In this programmatic paper, I argue that the universal constraints of Optimality Theory (OT) need to be complemented by a theory of diachronic adaptation. OT constraints are traditionally stipulated as part of Universal Grammar, but this misses the generalization that the grammatical constraints normally correspond to constraints on language use. As in biology, observed adaptive patterns in lan...