From language development to language evolution: A unified view of human lexical creativity

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Brochhagen, Thomas; Boleda, Gemma; Gualdoni, Eleonora; Xu, Yang
• 署名单位: Pompeu Fabra University; ICREA; University of Toronto
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-8216
• DOI: 10.1126/science.ade7981
• 发表日期: 2023-07-28
• 页码: 431-+
• 关键词: word; semantics; meanings

摘要

A defining property of human language is the creative use of words to express multiple meanings through word meaning extension. Such lexical creativity is manifested at different timescales, ranging from language development in children to the evolution of word meanings over history. We explored whether different manifestations of lexical creativity build on a common foundation. Using computational models, we show that a parsimonious set of semantic knowledge types characterize developmental data as well as evolutionary products of meaning extension spanning over 1400 languages. Models for evolutionary data account very well for developmental data, and vice versa. These findings suggest a unified foundation for human lexical creativity underlying both the fleeting products of individual ontogeny and the evolutionary products of phylogeny across languages.