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Language change

Module Description

Lecturer	Vivi Nastase
Module Type	Proseminar / Hauptseminar
Language	English
First Session	29.04.2019
Time and Place	Monday, 11:15-12:45, INF 329 / SR 26
Commitment Period	tbd.

Prerequisite for Participation

Assessment

There will be a course project -- the same for everybody, with an option to develop your own different project if you convince me your idea fits with the course topic.

Content

Most frequently when we work with language corpora we disregard the diachronic aspect of language. Language however has always been in constant flux. In this course we will look at various aspects related to language change, and a variety of methods used to understand, explore or exploit this attribute of language. We will look at how words are born or die, at word sense changes, at changes in concepts related to specific topics, at historically motivated changes, and possibly also at sound, spelling and grammatical changes.

Module Overview

Agenda

Date	Session	Materials
April 29	Introduction	Course intro List of papers Project description
May 6	no class
May 13	Theoretical introduction to Historical Linguistics, and a couple of applications	Ute Gradmann, Steffen Knapp, Max Bacher
May 20	Reading group	[Michael S.] MDL-based Models for Alignment of Etymological Data Wettig et al., 2011 [Fabian] Proto-Indo-European Lexicon: The Generative Etymological Dictionary of Indo-European Languages Pyysalo, 2017 Indo-European languages tree by Levenshtein distance Serva and Petroni, 2007 [Maja G.] Language Family Relationship Preserved in Non-native English Nagata, 2014
May 27	Reading group	[Jason] Identifying linguistic selection and innovation while controlling for cultural drift Karjus et al., 2018 Evolutionary forces in language change Ahern et al., 2016 [Frank] Cultural Shift or Linguistic Drift? Comparing Two Computational Measures of Semantic Change Hamilton et al., 2016 Don't Get Fooled by Word Embeddings -- Better Watch their Neighborhood Hellrich and Hahn, 2017 [Laura] Historical semantic chaining and efficient communication: The case of container names Xu et al., 2016
June 3	Reading group	[Arthur] Using context and phonetic features in models of etymological sound change Wettig et al., 2012 [Rebecca] Identifying cognates by phonetic and semantic similarity Kondrak, 2001 [Julia] Automatic Discrimination between Cognates and Borrowings Ciobanu and Dinu, 2015 Simulating Language Evolution: a Tool for Historical Linguistics Ciobanu and Dinu, 2018
June 10	holiday! :)
June 17	Reading group	[Georg] Natural selection in the modern english lexicon Grieve, 2018 The Study of the Perception of Code-switching to English in German Advertising Zhiganova, 2016 [Ozan] Intra-sentential and Inter-sentential Code-switching in Turkish-English Bilinguals in New York City, U.S Koban, 2013 [Verena] Language Modeling for Code-Mixing: The Role of Linguistic Theory based Synthetic Data Pratapa et al., 2018
June 24	Reading group	[Irina] Constructions, construal and cooperation in the evolution of language Pleyer and Lindner, 2014 [Tai] Phonological factors in social media writing Eisenstein, 2013 [Konstantin] Making "fetch" happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on the success of lexical innovations Stewart and Eisenstein, 2018
Special date: June 25 (6pm -- 8pm, SR25 INF328)	Invited talk	Michael Pleyer Becoming Language-Ready: A Short Introduction to the Evolution of Language What do apes, aliens, and robots have in common? They all rank among the topics that evolutionary linguists study in their interdisciplinary endeavor to shed light on the evolutionary development of language. The social, cognitive and communicative capacities of nonhuman primates offer a fascinating avenue for investigations of the evolutionary platform on which human language is built. Experimental studies on the cultural transmission of “alien languages” in the laboratory provide us with insights how linguistic structure emerges over time. Work in robotics, AI and computational modelling shows how structured communication systems can be implemented in embodied agents and how these systems evolve over time. These and other research avenues contribute to the mosaic of language evolution that evolutionary linguistics try to uncover. In other words, all these lines of evidence help us to establish how we became “language-ready” over the course of human evolution. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to language evolution research. More specifically, I will talk about some of the most important lines of inquiry that are relevant to answering the following questions: What are the social and cognitive foundations of language-readiness? And what can we say about the evolution of these social and cognitive-foundations?
July 1	Reading group	[Jonas] Studying the history of ideas using topic models Hall et al., 2008 [Rebekka] Deep Temporal-Recurrent-Replicated-Softmax for Topical Trends over Time Gupta et al., 2018 [Sebastian] Automatically Harvesting Katakana-English Term Pairs from Search Engine Query Logs Brill et al. 2001
July 8	Reading group	[Zibu Lin and Souvenir] Semantic typology and efficient communication Kemp et al., 2018 [Eric] Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium Xu et al., 2017
July 15	Reading group	[Leonard] On the Linearity of Semantic Change: Investigating Meaning Variation via Dynamic Graph Models Eger and Mehler, 2016 Analogies in Complex Verb Meaning Shifts: the Effect of Affect in Semantic Similarity Models Kopper and Schulte im Walde, 2018 [Philipp] Algorithms in the historical emergence of word senses Ramiro et al., 2018 [Miriam] That’s sick dude!: Automatic identification of word sense change across different timescales Mitra et al., 2014
July 22	Reading group	[Michael Z.] Issues in Code-Switching: Competing Theories and Models Boztepe, 2002 [Ozan] Report on the mini-survey on code switching for German ads [Vivi] Reconstructing a big picture of language change from the material we have read.

Literature

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