交际需要调节语言变化中的竞争
Communicative need modulates competition in language change
摘要：
所有现存的语言都会随着时间的推移而变化。其原因是多方面的，其中之一是新的语言成分的出现和借用。新成分与语义或语法功能相似的旧成分之间的竞争可能会导致说话者更喜欢其中一个，而放弃另一个。我们介绍了一种通用的方法来量化历时语料库中的语言元素之间的竞争，它不需要语言特定的资源，比足够大的语料库。这种方法很容易适用于广泛的语言和语言子系统。在这里，我们将其应用于词汇数据在五个语料库不同的语言，类型，体裁和时间跨度。我们发现，交际需求的变化是一致的预测词汇竞争动态。近似同义词更有可能直接竞争，如果它们属于一个话题，其重要性是随着时间的推移，语言使用者是恒定的，可能会导致其中一个竞争词的灭绝。相比之下，在对语言使用者越来越重要的话题中，近同义词往往不直接竞争，而是可以共存。这表明，除了词与词之间的直接竞争外，语言变化还可能受到主题或语义子空间之间的竞争的驱动。
英文摘要：
All living languages change over time. The causes for this are many, one being the emergence and borrowing of new linguistic elements. Competition between the new elements and older ones with a similar semantic or grammatical function may lead to speakers preferring one of them, and leaving the other to go out of use. We introduce a general method for quantifying competition between linguistic elements in diachronic corpora which does not require language-specific resources other than a sufficiently large corpus. This approach is readily applicable to a wide range of languages and linguistic subsystems. Here, we apply it to lexical data in five corpora differing in language, type, genre, and time span. We find that changes in communicative need are consistently predictive of lexical competition dynamics. Near-synonymous words are more likely to directly compete if they belong to a topic of conversation whose importance to language users is constant over time, possibly leading to the extinction of one of the competing words. By contrast, in topics which are increasing in importance for language users, near-synonymous words tend not to compete directly and can coexist. This suggests that, in addition to direct competition between words, language change can be driven by competition between topics or semantic subspaces.
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