Self-organization and Language Evolution: System, Population and Individual

1. Self-organization and Language Evolution: System, Population and Individual Self-organization in the system: A case study on homophony By Jinyun Ke Presented by Zhengbo Zhou

2. Outline • Some words on self-organization • Some words on homophony • Cross-language comparison of the degree of homophony • Homophony and phonological resource • Self-organization in homophony • Self-organization in lexicon

3. Self-organization • Self-organization is a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems typically (though not always) display emergent properties– Wikipedia • This is similar as what the author cited in the paper (p19)

4. Classic case:Bénard Instability

5. Common properties • Emergence • Multistability • Phase transition

6. Background of homophony • Concept • The rise of homophony • The fall of homophony • The exaptive usage

7. What is homophony • I believe everybody here knows this term  • Two or more words having the same sound but differing in meaning or derivation – OED • Example—( a lot ) 原因(reason)—元音(vowel)(yuan2yin1) site—sight—cite

8. The rise of homophony—from sound change • Most of homophones arise as a result of phonological merger. • English—great vowel shift • meat (mate sound in Middle English) • Chinese—sound change • Some southern dialects keep some features of ancient Chinese phonetic characteristic (Cantonese)

9. The rise of homophony—from borrowing • English • sheik: from Arabic “shaikh” • chic: from French • Chinese • 酷(ku4): the meaning “good, cool” is from English “cool”

10. The fall of homophony—split from sound change • Homophones rarely split • Often explained as borrowing or analogy • Chinese—”taboo interference” through history (name of holy things, name of the emperor, name of government position etc)

11. The fall of homophony—replaced by synonyms • Replaced by synonyms: • gallus (rooster) vs gattus (cat) • When [l] became [t], “rooster” was replaced by synonyms • Replaced by borrowed synonyms: • Harurai in Papua New Guinea.

12. The exaptive usage of homophony • Chinese special idioms using homophony: 歇后语(xie1hou4yu3)—two parts in an idiom, like a riddle, and the homophones appear mostly in the second part (the answer of the riddle), usually has two level of meanings: 和尚打伞－无发（法）无天 He2shang4da3san3-wu2fa3wu2tian1 A monk with an open umbrella over his head, He doesn’t have hair and he cannot see the sky- (somebody) is not constrained by the law or the Heaven.

13. Cross-language comparison of degree of homophony • Difficulties to shoot • Degree of homophony in Chinese dialects • Degree of homophony in three Germanic languages

14. Cross-language comparison of degree of homophony • How to compare between or among languages about their degree of homophony • Tackling the dataset: a set of Chinese dialects and large database of words for three Germanic languages • Polyseme pruning to get rid of words with same meaning but different POS usage.

15. Degrees of homophony in Chinese dialects

17. Degrees of homophony in three Germanic languages

18. Degrees of homophony in three Germanic languages

19. Homophony and phonological resource • Phonological resource • Predict the degree of homophony for a language

20. Measuring phonological resource • “Phonological resource” refers to the number of possible distinctive forms a language can make use of to construct words or represent morphemes • Combination of consonants and vowels to form syllables and concatenating the syllables. • Examples: English: [CCCVCCC] scripts; Dutch: [CCCVCCCC] abstractst; German: [CCCVCCCC] strolchst; Chinese: [CGVN] liang; [CV] ta (smaller segment size)

21. Measuring phonological resource • The number of segments and the types of canonical forms may provide a measure for phonological resource • Measure of the exploitation rate of phonological resource by examining CV combination only

22. Prediction of the degree of homophony • The hypothesis is very straightforward and also can be applied very well on Chinese (although there is some controversy on the wordness of Chinese). However, the author argues that it is invalid to use Hypothesis I to predict the degree of homophony in a language. • Author: “Due to the difficulty of obtaining a representative index of the size of phonological resource, it does not seem to be a good approach to predict the degree of homophony based on this parameter.” And …

23. Prediction of the degree of homophony • And here is the second hypothesis he proposed, which seems more valid from the data in the paper.

24. Self-organization in homophony • Disyllabification in Chinese • Measure of degree of disyllabification • Disyllabification and homophony avoidance • Grammatical differentiation between homophones

25. Self-organization comes • So, from above, more monosyllabic words means more homophones, which may affect communication negatively. From self-organization point of view, there should be an emergence process to “organize” the system. So does the disyllabification avoid homophony? • Take Chinese as the study case

26. Disyllabification in Chinese--Measure of degree of disyllabification • In modern Chinese monosyllabic words are only in a small portion, about 29% in the frequent list of Putonghua (mandarin) • The percentage of disyllabic words is estimated by counting the proportion of real words among the 500 most highly associated character pairs generated from a given sample of texts. –Sproat (2002)

27. Disyllabification in Chinese—Disyllabification and homophony avoidance • Homophony avoidance is the mechanism at the initial stage for disyllabification through the Chinese evolution history • The homophony avoidance hypothesis would predict the following correlations: a smaller phonological inventory implies a larger degree of homophony in monosyllabic morphemes, and consequently a larger degree of disyllabification.

28. Grammatical differentiation between homophones • A pair of homophones sharing the same grammatical class are more likely to cause confusion than words belonging to different grammatical classes.

29. Self-organization in the lexicon: Monosyllabicity and lexicalization • There is the self-organization characteristics for the evolution of the lexicon according to monosyllabicity and lexicalization.

30. Questions

31. Thanks!