Evolution, optimization, and language change: the case of Bengali verb inflections

Authors:
Monojit Choudhury;Vaibhav Jalan;Sudeshna Sarkar;Anupam Basu
Affiliations:
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India;Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, India;Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India;Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India
Venue:
SigMorPhon '07 Proceedings of Ninth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Morphology and Phonology
Year:
2007

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Abstract

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.