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Although lexical borrowing is an important aspect of language evolution, there have been few attempts to automate the identification of borrowings in lexical datasets. Moreover, none of the solutions which have been proposed so far identify borrowings across multiple languages. This study proposes a new method for the task and tests it on a newly compiled large comparative dataset of 48 South-East Asian languages from Southern China. The method yields very promising results, while it is conceptually straightforward and easy to apply. This makes the approach a perfect candidate for computer-assisted exploratory studies on lexical borrowing in contact areas.

© 2019 R. Harald Baayen et al. The discriminative lexicon is introduced as a mathematical and computational model of the mental lexicon. This novel theory is inspired by word and paradigm morphology but operationalizes the concept of proportional analogy using the mathematics of linear algebra. It embraces the discriminative perspective on language, rejecting the idea that words' meanings are compositional in the sense of Frege and Russell and arguing instead that the relation between form and meaning is fundamentally discriminative. The discriminative lexicon also incorporates the insight from machine learning that end-to-end modeling is much more effective than working with a cascade of models targeting individual subtasks. The computational engine at the heart of the discriminative lexicon is linear discriminative learning: simple linear networks are used for mapping form onto meaning and meaning onto form, without requiring the hierarchies of post-Bloomfieldian 'hidden' constructs such as phonemes, morphemes, and stems. We show that this novel model meets the criteria of accuracy (it properly recognizes words and produces words correctly), productivity (the model is remarkably successful in understanding and producing novel complex words), and predictivity (it correctly predicts a wide array of experimental phenomena in lexical processing). The discriminative lexicon does not make use of static representations that are stored in memory and that have to be accessed in comprehension and production. It replaces static representations by states of the cognitive system that arise dynamically as a consequence of external or internal stimuli. The discriminative lexicon brings together visual and auditory comprehension as well as speech production into an integrated dynamic system of coupled linear networks.

Critics of multiple realizability have recently argued that we should concentrate solely on actual here-and-now realizations that are found in nature. The possibility of alternative, but unactualized, realizations is regarded as uninteresting because it is taken to be a question of pure logic or an unverifiable scenario of science fiction. However, in the biological context only a contingent set of realizations is actualized. Drawing on recent work on the theory of neutral biological spaces, the article shows that we can have ways of assessing the modal dimension of multiple realizability that do not have to rely on mere conceivability.

Abstract Hyphenated compounds have largely been neglected in the studies of compounding, which have seldom analysed compounds in context. In this study, we argue that the hyphen use in compounds is strongly motivated. Hyphenation is used when words form a unit, which reduces the possibility of parsing them into separate units or other forms. The current study adopts a new perspective on contextual factors, namely, which part of speech (PoS) the compound as a whole belongs to and how people correctly parse a compound into a unit. This process can be observed and analysed by considering examples. This study therefore holds that hyphenation might have gradually become a compounding technique that differs from general compounding principles. To better understand hyphenated compounds and the motivation for using hyphenation, we conduct a quantitative investigation into their distribution frequency to explore how English hyphenated compounds have been used in over the last 200 years. Diachronic change in the frequency of the distribution for compounds has seldom been considered. This question is explored by using frequency data obtained from the three databases that contain hyphenated compounds. Diachronic analysis shows that the frequencies of tokens and types in hyphenated compounds have been increasing, and changes in both frequencies follow the S-curve model. Historical evidence shows that hyphenation in compounds, as an orthographic form, does not seem to disappear easily. Familiarity and economy, as suggested in the cognitive studies of compounding, cannot adequately explain this phenomenon. The three databases that we used provide cross-verification that suggests that hyphenation has evolved into a compounding technique. Language users probably unconsciously take advantage of the discriminative learning model to remind themselves that these combinations should be parsed differently. Thus the hyphenation compounding technique facilitates communication efficiency. Overall, this study significantly enhances our understanding of the nature of compounding, the motivations for using hyphenation, and its cognitive processing.

This study compares eleven verbs of letting in six Germanic and five Romance languages. The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the differences and similarities in the semasiological variation of these verbs, both across and within the two language groups they represent. The results of a Multidimensional Scaling analysis based on a parallel corpus of film subtitles show that the verbs differ along several semantic dimensions, such as letting versus leaving, factitive versus permissive causation, as well as modality and discourse function. Although the main differences between the verbs lend themselves to a genealogical interpretation (Germanic vs. Romance), a distributional analysis of constructional patterns in which the verbs occur reveals that these differences are in fact distributed areally, with a centre and a periphery.

In his book about his Irish-South African family and his childhood under apartheid, White Boy Running, Christopher Hope writes of the ‘bitter emotion’ that infuses the politics of both Ireland and South Africa. This article considers how the histories of political struggle in both places are intertwined through readings of photographs taken in Ireland and South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. I draw on these photographs to develop an argument about how affective archives of music, images, and poetry travel across time and space and serve as a conduit for raising awareness about injustice and for forging transnational solidarity. At the same time these photographs provoke a consideration about how Irish identification with the struggle of black South Africans is complicated by the longer history of British colonialism and racism and how solidarity requires both remembering and forgetting. This article also begins to trace the presence and work of South African activists in Ireland who campaigned against apartheid while they were in exile.

AbstractScientific writings, as one essential part of human culture, have evolved over centuries into their current form. Knowing how scientific writings evolved is particularly helpful in understanding how trends in scientific culture developed. It also allows us to better understand how scientific culture was interwoven with human culture generally. The availability of massive digitized texts and the progress in computational technologies today provide us with a convenient and credible way to discern the evolutionary patterns in scientific writings by examining the diachronic linguistic changes. The linguistic changes in scientific writings reflect the genre shifts that took place with historical changes in science and scientific writings. This study investigates a general evolutionary linguistic pattern in scientific writings. It does so by merging two credible computational methods: relative entropy; word-embedding concreteness and imageability. It thus creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes in the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (PTRS, 1665–1869). The data from two computational approaches can be well mapped to support the argument that this journal followed the evolutionary trend of increasing professionalization and specialization. But it also shows that language use in this journal was greatly influenced by historical events and other socio-cultural factors. This study, as a “culturomic” approach, demonstrates that the linguistic evolutionary patterns in scientific discourse have been interrupted by external factors even though this scientific discourse would likely have cumulatively developed into a professional and specialized genre. The approaches proposed by this study can make a great contribution to full-text analysis in scientometrics.