Berlin 2012 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 13: Communication and Language

SOE 13.4: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 28. März 2012, 14:45–15:00, H 0110

Group-structured speech community and language change — •Cristina-Maria Pop and Erwin Frey — Arnold Sommerfeld Center and CeNS, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Theresienstr. 37, 80333 München, Germany

The processes leading to language change are manifold. The need to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of informations favors agreement on a conventional sign for a recurring problem. On the other hand, speakers tend to use particular linguistic variants associated with the social groups they identify with. Innovations and the influence of other groups propagating across the speech community as new variant forms sustain the competition between linguistic variants.

With the Utterance Selection Model, an evolutionary description of language change, Baxter et al. [1] have provided a mathematical formulation of the interactions inside a group of speakers, revealing the mechanisms that lead to or inhibit the fixation of linguistic variants. Taking the Utterance Selection Model one step further by describing a speech community consisting of multiple interacting groups allows us to gain more understanding about the way in which linguistic variants propagate and how their distribution depends on the interaction strength between groups.

[1] Utterance selection model of language change, G. J. Baxter, R.A. Blythe, W. Croft, Phys. Rev. E 73, 046118 (2006)