Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

The verb inflections of Bengali underwent a series of phonological change between 10th and 18th centuries, which gave rise to several modern dialects of the language. In this paper, we offer a functional explanation for this change by quantifying the functional pressures of ease of articulation, perceptual contrast and learnability through objective functions or constraints, or both. The multi-objective and multi-constraint optimization problem has been solved through genetic algorithm, whereby we have observed the emergence of Pareto-optimal dialects in the system that closely resemble some of the real ones.

In this work, we attempt to capture patterns of co-occurrence across vowel systems and at the same time figure out the nature of the force leading to the emergence of such patterns. For this purpose we define a weighted network where the vowels are the nodes and an edge between two nodes (read vowls) signify their co-occurrence likelihood over the vowel inventories. Through this network we identify communities of vowels, which essentially reflect their patterns of co-occurrence across languages. We observe that in the assortative vowel communities the constituent nodes (read vowels) are largely uncorrelated in terms of their features indicating that they are formed based on the principle of maximal perceptual contrast. However, in the rest of the communities, strong correlations are reflected among the constituent vowels with respect to their features indicating that it is the principle of feature economy that binds them together.

This paper discusses the reconstruction of the Elamite language s phonology from its orthography using the Gradual Learning Algorithm, which was re-purposed to learn underlying phonological forms from surface orthography. Practical issues are raised regarding the difficulty of mapping between orthography and phonology, and Optimality Theory s neglected Lexicon Optimization module is highlighted.