Linguistics and English Language

Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Juan Guerrero Montero (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Quantifying evolutionary pressures in corpus data: methodology and applications

Abstract: With the emergence of massive digitalised historical corpora making data on language usage over time more easily accessible than ever before, data-driven methods may shed light on the nature of the fundamental forces that drive language change. A key question is how language structure is shaped by competition between linguistic variants, and how this process is driven forward by evolutionary mechanisms like drift and selection. However, current methods for the numerical analysis of competition in language still suffer from some issues. In this talk, I will discuss several methodological advances that allow us to effectively and accurately estimate evolutionary parameters in language change, together with two applications that illustrate how these methods can be used to characterise selective biases and detect cultural shifts in corpus data.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

May 02 2023 -

Language evolution seminar

2023-05-02: Quantifying evolutionary pressures in corpus data: methodology and applications

Room 1.20, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD; online via link invitation