Measuring language divergence by intra-lexical comparison
ACL-44 Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and the 44th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Languages evolve, undergoing repeated small changes, some with permanent effect and some not. Changes affecting a language may be independent or contact-induced. Independent changes arise internally or, if externally, from non-linguistic causes. En masse, such changes cause isolated languages to drift apart in lexical form and grammatical structure. Contact-induced changes can happen when languages share speakers, or when their speakers are in contact. Frequently, languages in contact are related, having a common ancestor from which they still retain visible structure. This relatedness makes it difficult to distinguish contact-induced change from inherited similarities. In this paper, we present a simulation of contact-induced change. We show that it is possible to distinguish contact-induced change from independent change given (a) enough data, and (b) that the contact-induced change is strong enough. For a particular model, we determine how much data is enough to distinguish these two cases at p