{"id":88,"date":"2010-02-20T16:25:05","date_gmt":"2010-02-21T00:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/?p=88"},"modified":"2010-02-20T16:28:28","modified_gmt":"2010-02-21T00:28:28","slug":"language-structure-is-partly-determined-by-social-structure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/2010\/02\/20\/language-structure-is-partly-determined-by-social-structure\/","title":{"rendered":"Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Lupyan &amp; Dale (2010)<\/div>\n<p>Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure<\/p>\n<div>The authors study demographic factors including population size, area spoken, and linguistic contact for over 2000 languages included in WALS. \u00a0They conclude that all factors are negatively correlated with\u00a0morphological\u00a0complexity measured across a variety of features (type, case, verb morphology, agreement,\u00a0evidentials\/possibility, negation\/plurality, tense, aspect, mood, possession, articles, demonstratives pronouns). \u00a0They argue that exoteric languages, those with larger populations, which are spoken over a large area, or have heavy language contact tend to shift complexity from morphology to lexical items.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The authors propose the Linguistic Niche Hypothesis which states that language structures are subjected to different evolutionary pressures in different social environments. \u00a0Specifically they claim that esoteric languages have mostly L1 learners which can benefit from the excess redundancy provided by complex morphology while exoteric languages have a large degree of L2 learners due to their roll as interface languages. \u00a0L2 learners have difficultly learning complex morphology and so do not benefit from the added redundancy. \u00a0Highly exoteric languages, therefore, tend to have reduced morphological complexity creating higher overall fitness for the language by affording L2 learners an easier learning experience.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Lupyan &amp; Dale present\u00a0compelling\u00a0models showing the general trend they describe. \u00a0Their hypothesis relies on the strong link between language structure and learning which needs further exploration. \u00a0Their notion of language fitness and redundancy (adopted from Nowak et \u00a0al. 2002) is\u00a0intriguing but relies on an incredibly simplified model of the relationship between form and meaning. \u00a0More sophisticated models based on Information Theory should supplant these simplistic models of language redundancy,complexity, and learnability. \u00a0This would allow an explicit connection to formal learning theory to be developed to further test the Linguistic Niche Hypothesis.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lupyan &amp; Dale (2010) Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure The authors study demographic factors including population size, area spoken, and linguistic contact for over 2000 languages included in WALS. \u00a0They conclude that all factors are negatively correlated with\u00a0morphological\u00a0complexity measured across a variety of features (type, case, verb morphology, agreement,\u00a0evidentials\/possibility, negation\/plurality, tense, aspect, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-papers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions\/90"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidclausen.org\/tower\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}