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Universal attractors in language evolution provide evidence for the kinds of efficiency pressures involved
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. 2022. Vol. 9. Article 58.
Seržant I., Moroz G.
Efficiency is central to understanding the communicative and cognitive underpinnings of language. However, efficiency management is a complex mechanism in which different efficiency effects—such as articulatory, processing and planning ease, mental accessibility, and informativity, online and offline efficiency effects—conspire to yield the coding of linguistic signs. While we do not yet exactly understand the interactional mechanism of these different effects, we argue that universal attractors are an important component of any dynamic theory of efficiency that would be aimed at predicting efficiency effects across languages. Attractors are defined as universal states around which language evolution revolves. Methodologically, in contrast to many previous, language-specific studies on efficiency, we approach efficiency from a cross-linguistic perspective on the basis of a world-wide sample of 383 languages from 53 families, balancing all six macro-areas (Eurasia, North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Oceania). We focus on the grammatical domain of verbal person–number subject indexes. We claim that there is an attractor state in this domain to which languages tend to develop and tend not to leave if they happen to comply with the attractor in their earlier stages of evolution. The attractor is characterized by different lengths for each person and number combination, structured along Zipf’s predictions. Moreover, the attractor strongly prefers non-compositional, cumulative coding of person and number. There are two domains in which efficiency pressures are most powerful: strive towards less processing and articulatory effort while increased lexicon complexity and memory costs are weaker efficiency pressures for this grammatical category given its order of frequency. Constant information flow overrides articulatory efficiency.
Publication based on the results of:
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The paper is devoted to the variable number marking in Shughni
nouns and reports the results of corpus and experimental studies. In some languages,
including Shughni, the marking of plural nouns is not compulsory. Many
factors such as animacy, referentiality, morphological and semantic properties,
or syntactic position may determine the presence or absence of number marking.
The corpus study investigates ...
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Vinogradov A., Rodionov O., Travaux et Memoires 2026 Vol. 30 No. 2 P. 1075–1089
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Поцелуев В. А., Ural-Altaic Studies 2026 Vol. 62 No. 3 P. 62–81
In recent years, the researchers working on Uralic languages within Minimalism seem to have built a consensus on how to define the
position of negation in any language with a negative verb. The main and usually the only argument is based on the work [Mitchell 2006].
The argument is as follows: if the negative verb expresses tense, ...
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Государственный университет просвещения, 2026.
Настоящее издание представляет собой коллективный труд, посвящённый юбилеям основателей-руководителей научных школ лингвистического факультета Государственного университета просвещения Максименко Ольги Ивановны, доктора филологических наук, профессора, профессора кафедры теории языка, англистики и прикладной лингвистики, Председателя
диссертационного совета 72.2.020.05 и Хухуни Георгия Теймуразовича, доктора филологических
наук, профессора, профессора кафедры теории языка, англистики и прикладной лингвистики.
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1 HSE University, Moscow, Russian Federation, shmеlevim@mail.ru
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