Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words

PloS One
Susanne Vejdemo, Thomas Hörberg

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 model shows that, in addition to frequency, synonyms, senses and imageability are significantly related to the lexical replacement rate of content words-in particular the number of synonyms that a word has. The model shows no differences in lexical replacement rate between word classes, and outperforms a model with word class and word frequency predictors only.

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Citations

Jul 3, 2016·Psychonomic Bulletin & Review·Mark Pagel
Oct 31, 2019·PloS One·Gerd CarlingJohan Frid
Feb 13, 2019·Behavior Research Methods·Ying LiThomas T Hills
Apr 21, 2021·Cognitive Science·Padraic Monaghan, Seán G Roberts
Aug 7, 2021·Behavior Research Methods·Annika TjukaJohann-Mattis List
Aug 18, 2021·Cognition·Aotao XuYang Xu

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Software Mentioned

ggplot2
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R
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lmSupport

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