dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaModeling the Co-occurrence Principles of the Consonant Inventories: A Complex Network Approach
| Authors | Animesh Mukherjee, Monojit Choudhury, Anupam Basu, Niloy Ganguly |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | physics/0606132 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0606132 |
| DOI | 10.1142/S0129183107010395 |
Abstract
Speech sounds of the languages all over the world show remarkable patterns of cooccurrence. In this work, we attempt to automatically capture the patterns of cooccurrence of the consonants across languages and at the same time figure out the nature of the force leading to the emergence of such patterns. For this purpose we define a weighted network where the consonants are the nodes and an edge between two nodes (read consonants) signify their co-occurrence likelihood over the consonant inventories. Through this network we identify communities of consonants that essentially reflect their patterns of co-occurrence across languages. We test the goodness of the communities and observe that the constituent consonants frequently occur in such groups in real languages also. Interestingly, the consonants forming these communities reflect strong correlations in terms of their features, which indicate that the principle of feature economy acts as a driving force towards community formation. In order to measure the strength of this force we propose an information theoretic definition of feature economy and show that indeed the feature economy exhibited by the consonant communities are substantially better than those if the consonant inventories had evolved just by chance.
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"abstract": "Speech sounds of the languages all over the world show remarkable patterns of\ncooccurrence. In this work, we attempt to automatically capture the patterns of\ncooccurrence of the consonants across languages and at the same time figure out\nthe nature of the force leading to the emergence of such patterns. For this\npurpose we define a weighted network where the consonants are the nodes and an\nedge between two nodes (read consonants) signify their co-occurrence likelihood\nover the consonant inventories. Through this network we identify communities of\nconsonants that essentially reflect their patterns of co-occurrence across\nlanguages. We test the goodness of the communities and observe that the\nconstituent consonants frequently occur in such groups in real languages also.\nInterestingly, the consonants forming these communities reflect strong\ncorrelations in terms of their features, which indicate that the principle of\nfeature economy acts as a driving force towards community formation. In order\nto measure the strength of this force we propose an information theoretic\ndefinition of feature economy and show that indeed the feature economy\nexhibited by the consonant communities are substantially better than those if\nthe consonant inventories had evolved just by chance.",
"arxiv_id": "physics/0606132",
"authors": [
"Animesh Mukherjee",
"Monojit Choudhury",
"Anupam Basu",
"Niloy Ganguly"
],
"categories": [
"physics.soc-ph"
],
"doi": "10.1142/S0129183107010395",
"title": "Modeling the Co-occurrence Principles of the Consonant Inventories: A Complex Network Approach",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0606132"
},
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