Narrow Results

The paper investigates the quantitative distribution of language types across languages of the world. The studies are based on three large-scale typological data bases: The World Color Survey, the Automated Similarity Judgment Project data base, and the World Atlas of Language Structures. The main finding is that a surprisingly large and varied collection of linguistic typologies show power law behavior. The bulk of the paper deals with the statistical validation of these findings.

In the early seventies, the bio-mathematician George Price developed a simple and concise mathematical description of evolutionary processes that abstracts away from the specific properties of biological evolution. In the talk I will argue argued that Price's framework is well-suited to model various aspects of the cultural evolution of language. The first part of the talk describes Price's approach in some detail. In the second part, case studies about its application to language evolution are presented.

Using a Pólya urn based diffusion model, we examine linguistic diffusion in a population of individuals with different types of social networks. Simulation results and statistical analyses show that individual factors, such as who (speakers or hearers) introduce preference for certain types of variants, and network structural features, e.g., level of centrality, collectively modulate the degree of diffusion. This work shows different diffusion efficiencies of speaker's and hearer's preferences for variants, evaluates the effect of individual learning and social factors on linguistic diffusion, and modifies previous diffusion theories focusing exclusively on individual or social factors.