Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words.

ABSTRACT: The rate of lexical replacement estimates the diachronic stability of word forms on the basis of how frequently a proto-language word is replaced or retained in its daughter languages. Lexical replacement rate has been shown to be highly related to word class and word frequency. In this paper, we argue that content words and function words behave differently with respect to lexical replacement rate, and we show that semantic factors predict the lexical replacement rate of content words. For the 167 content items in the Swadesh list, data was gathered on the features of lexical replacement rate, word class, frequency, age of acquisition, synonyms, arousal, imageability and average mutual information, either from published databases or gathered from corpora and lexica. A linear regression mo

SUBMITTER: Vejdemo S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4731055 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature