IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0016677.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Aging in Language Dynamics

Author

Listed:
  • Animesh Mukherjee
  • Francesca Tria
  • Andrea Baronchelli
  • Andrea Puglisi
  • Vittorio Loreto

Abstract

Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state in which we observe languages today closer to what would be a dynamical attractor with statistically stationary properties or rather closer to a non-steady state slowly evolving in time? Here we address this question in the framework of the emergence of shared linguistic categories in a population of individuals interacting through language games. The observed emerging asymptotic categorization, which has been previously tested - with success - against experimental data from human languages, corresponds to a metastable state where global shifts are always possible but progressively more unlikely and the response properties depend on the age of the system. This aging mechanism exhibits striking quantitative analogies to what is observed in the statistical mechanics of glassy systems. We argue that this can be a general scenario in language dynamics where shared linguistic conventions would not emerge as attractors, but rather as metastable states.

Suggested Citation

  • Animesh Mukherjee & Francesca Tria & Andrea Baronchelli & Andrea Puglisi & Vittorio Loreto, 2011. "Aging in Language Dynamics," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(2), pages 1-7, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0016677
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0016677
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016677
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016677&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0016677?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mark Pagel & Quentin D. Atkinson & Andrew Meade, 2007. "Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history," Nature, Nature, vol. 449(7163), pages 717-720, October.
    2. Erez Lieberman & Jean-Baptiste Michel & Joe Jackson & Tina Tang & Martin A. Nowak, 2007. "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language," Nature, Nature, vol. 449(7163), pages 713-716, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fan, Zhong-Yan & Lai, Ying-Cheng & Tang, Wallace Kit-Sang, 2020. "Likelihood category game model for knowledge consensus," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 540(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Liang Xu & Min Xu & Zehua Jiang & Xin Wen & Yishan Liu & Zaoyi Sun & Hongting Li & Xiuying Qian, 2023. "How have music emotions been described in Google books? Historical trends and corpus differences," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-11, December.
    2. Eduardo G Altmann & Janet B Pierrehumbert & Adilson E Motter, 2011. "Niche as a Determinant of Word Fate in Online Groups," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(5), pages 1-12, May.
    3. Alberto Acerbi & Vasileios Lampos & Philip Garnett & R Alexander Bentley, 2013. "The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(3), pages 1-6, March.
    4. Damian Ruck & R. Alexander Bentley & Alberto Acerbi & Philip Garnett & Daniel J. Hruschka, 2017. "Role Of Neutral Evolution In Word Turnover During Centuries Of English Word Popularity," Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 20(06n07), pages 1-16, September.
    5. Heng Chen & Junying Liang & Haitao Liu, 2015. "How Does Word Length Evolve in Written Chinese?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(9), pages 1-12, September.
    6. Dustin S. Stoltz & Marshall A. Taylor, 2019. "Concept Mover’s Distance: measuring concept engagement via word embeddings in texts," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 2(2), pages 293-313, July.
    7. David Bodoff & Ron Bekkerman & Julie Dai, 2017. "Evolution of language: An empirical study at eBay Big Data Lab," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(12), pages 1-17, December.
    8. Simone Pompei & Vittorio Loreto & Francesca Tria, 2011. "On the Accuracy of Language Trees," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(6), pages 1-11, June.
    9. Jean-Marc Luck & Anita Mehta, 2023. "Evolution of grammatical forms: some quantitative approaches," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 96(2), pages 1-15, February.
    10. Xi, Ning & Zhang, Zi-Ke & Zhang, Yi-Cheng & Ge, Zehui & She, Li & Zhang, Kui, 2014. "Cultural evolution: The case of babies’ first names," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 406(C), pages 139-144.
    11. Zejie Zhou & Boleslaw K Szymanski & Jianxi Gao, 2020. "Modeling competitive evolution of multiple languages," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(5), pages 1-16, May.
    12. Ackermann, Malte, 2013. "The communication of innovation: an empirical analysis of the advancement of innovation," Discussion Papers on Strategy and Innovation 13-02, Philipps-University Marburg, Department of Technology and Innovation Management (TIM).
    13. Charlie Pilgrim & Weisi Guo & Thomas T. Hills, 2021. "The Rising Entropy of English in the Attention Economy," Papers 2107.12848, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2023.
    14. Nico Neureiter & Peter Ranacher & Nour Efrat-Kowalsky & Gereon A. Kaiping & Robert Weibel & Paul Widmer & Remco R. Bouckaert, 2022. "Detecting contact in language trees: a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal transfer," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-14, December.
    15. Bradley Voytek, 2016. "The Virtuous Cycle of a Data Ecosystem," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(8), pages 1-6, August.
    16. Xueying Liu & Haoran Zhu & Lei Lei, 2022. "Dependency distance minimization: a diachronic exploration of the effects of sentence length and dependency types," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-9, December.
    17. Parshad, Rana D. & Bhowmick, Suman & Chand, Vineeta & Kumari, Nitu & Sinha, Neha, 2016. "What is India speaking? Exploring the “Hinglish” invasion," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 449(C), pages 375-389.
    18. Massimiliano Agovino & Michele Bevilacqua & Massimiliano Cerciello, 2022. "Language as a proxy for cultural change. A contrastive analysis for French and Italian lexicon on male homosexuality," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 56(1), pages 149-172, February.
    19. Shimpei Okuda & Michio Hosaka & Kazutoshi Sasahara, 2023. "Detecting directional forces in the evolution of grammar: A case study of the English perfect with intransitives across EEBO, COHA, and Google Books," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-8, December.
    20. R Alexander Bentley & Alberto Acerbi & Paul Ormerod & Vasileios Lampos, 2014. "Books Average Previous Decade of Economic Misery," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(1), pages 1-7, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0016677. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.