{"title":"Evolution, Optimization, and Language Change: The Case of Bengali Verb Inflections","authors":"M. Choudhury, Vaibhav Jalan, S. Sarkar, A. Basu","doi":"10.3115/1626516.1626525","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":186158,"journal":{"name":"Special Interest Group on Computational Morphology and Phonology Workshop","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2007-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"8","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Special Interest Group on Computational Morphology and Phonology Workshop","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3115/1626516.1626525","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 8
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.