Activity: Academic talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
In language we observe that highly frequent constructions are more stable over time: for example, highly frequent words are more robust against change than lower frequency words. This trend has functional a explanation: words with high usage frequency are less free to vary in their forms because this is more likely to cause communicative failure. This is analogous to purifying selection in biology, wherein traits with acute survival relevance exhibit less variation. This demonstrates that evolutionary and selective forces at work in biological systems have high potential relevance in cultural domains. This talk will focus on how this pattern plays out in complex linguistic systems, and how we might extend these findings to other cultural systems.