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Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words
The rate of lexical replacement estimates the diachronic stability of word forms on the basis of how frequently a proto-language word is replaced or retained in its daughter languages. Lexical replacement rate has been shown to be highly related to word class and word frequency. In this paper, we ar...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Public Library of Science
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4731055/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26820737 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147924 |
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author | Vejdemo, Susanne Hörberg, Thomas |
author_facet | Vejdemo, Susanne Hörberg, Thomas |
author_sort | Vejdemo, Susanne |
collection | PubMed |
description | The rate of lexical replacement estimates the diachronic stability of word forms on the basis of how frequently a proto-language word is replaced or retained in its daughter languages. Lexical replacement rate has been shown to be highly related to word class and word frequency. In this paper, we argue that content words and function words behave differently with respect to lexical replacement rate, and we show that semantic factors predict the lexical replacement rate of content words. For the 167 content items in the Swadesh list, data was gathered on the features of lexical replacement rate, word class, frequency, age of acquisition, synonyms, arousal, imageability and average mutual information, either from published databases or gathered from corpora and lexica. A linear regression model shows that, in addition to frequency, synonyms, senses and imageability are significantly related to the lexical replacement rate of content words–in particular the number of synonyms that a word has. The model shows no differences in lexical replacement rate between word classes, and outperforms a model with word class and word frequency predictors only. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4731055 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-47310552016-02-04 Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words Vejdemo, Susanne Hörberg, Thomas PLoS One Research Article The rate of lexical replacement estimates the diachronic stability of word forms on the basis of how frequently a proto-language word is replaced or retained in its daughter languages. Lexical replacement rate has been shown to be highly related to word class and word frequency. In this paper, we argue that content words and function words behave differently with respect to lexical replacement rate, and we show that semantic factors predict the lexical replacement rate of content words. For the 167 content items in the Swadesh list, data was gathered on the features of lexical replacement rate, word class, frequency, age of acquisition, synonyms, arousal, imageability and average mutual information, either from published databases or gathered from corpora and lexica. A linear regression model shows that, in addition to frequency, synonyms, senses and imageability are significantly related to the lexical replacement rate of content words–in particular the number of synonyms that a word has. The model shows no differences in lexical replacement rate between word classes, and outperforms a model with word class and word frequency predictors only. Public Library of Science 2016-01-28 /pmc/articles/PMC4731055/ /pubmed/26820737 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147924 Text en © 2016 Vejdemo, Hörberg http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Vejdemo, Susanne Hörberg, Thomas Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words |
title | Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words |
title_full | Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words |
title_fullStr | Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words |
title_full_unstemmed | Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words |
title_short | Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words |
title_sort | semantic factors predict the rate of lexical replacement of content words |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4731055/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26820737 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147924 |
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