29.2712, Books: Adaptive Languages: Bentz

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-2712. Fri Jun 29 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.2712, Books: Adaptive Languages: Bentz

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Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2018 10:39:01
From: Pablo Dominguez Andersen [pablo.dominguez at degruyter.com]
Subject: Adaptive Languages: Bentz

 


Title: Adaptive Languages 
Subtitle: An Information-Theoretic Account of Linguistic Diversity 
Series Title: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]  

Publication Year: 2018 
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
	   http://www.degruyter.com/mouton
	

Book URL: https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/495096?format=G 


Author: Christian Bentz

Hardback: ISBN:  9783110560107 Pages: 218 Price: U.S. $ 114.99


Abstract:

Languages carry information. To fulfil this purpose, they employ a multitude
of coding strategies. This book explores a core property of linguistic coding
– called lexical diversity. Parallel text corpora of overall more than 1800
texts written in more than 1200 languages are the basis for computational
analyses. Different measures of lexical diversity are discussed and tested,
and Shannon’s measure of uncertainty – the entropy – is chosen to assess
differences in the distributions of words. To further explain this variation,
a range of descriptive, explanatory, and grouping factors are considered in a
series of statistical models. The first category includes writing systems,
word-formation patterns, registers and styles. The second category includes
population size, non-native speaker proportions and language status. Grouping
factors further elicit whether the results extrapolate across – or are limited
to – specific language families and areas. This account marries
information-theoretic methods with a complex systems framework, illustrating
how languages adapt to the varying needs of their users. It sheds light on the
puzzling diversity of human languages in a quantitative, data driven and
reproducible manner.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     General Linguistics


Written In: English  (eng)

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