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Abstract

The sound inventories of the world's languages self-organize themselves giving rise to similar cross-linguistic patterns. In this work, we attempt to explain this phenomenon of self-organization, which shapes the structure of the sound inventories, through a complex network approach. We also attempt to analyze the patterns of similarity that emerges as a result of this self-organization and in turn affects the evolution of the inventories.

In order to explain the self-organization, the goes on in the consonant inventories we define the occurrence network of consonants, and systematically study some of the impor- tant properties of this network that sheds some light on the principles of organization of the consonant inventories. A crucial observation is that the occurrence of consonants across the languages of the world follows a power law distribution. This property is arguably a consequence of the principle of preferential attachment. In order to support this argument, we propose a synthesis model, which reproduces the degree distribution for the network to a close approximation.

For the purpose of studying the similarity patterns across the consonant inventories, we define a weighted network, where the consonants are the nodes and an edge between two nodes (read consonants) signify their co-occurrence likelihood over the consonant inventories. Through this network we identify communities of consonants that essentially reflect their patterns of co-occurrence across languages. We test the goodness of the communities and observe that the constituent consonants frequently occur in such groups in real languages also. Interestingly, the consonants forming these communities reflect strong correlations in terms of their features, which indicates that the principle of feature economy acts as a driving force towards community formation. In order to measure the strength of this force, we pro- pose an information theoretic definition of feature economy and show that indeed the feature economy exhibited by the consonant communities are substantially better than those where the consonant inventories are assumed to have evolved just by chance.

We are presently trying to have a synthesis model for the for the co-occurrence network of consonants so as to understand the significance of the �patterns of co-occurrence� in the self-organization of the consonant inventories. We are also trying to perform similar studies for the vowel inventories and compare them with those of the consonant inventories.

@techreport{mukherjee07soundInventory,
  author={Animesh Mukherjee},
  title={Self-Organization of the Sound Inventories: An Explanation based on Complex Networks},
  year={2007},
  institution={Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India},
  note={PhD registration seminar report},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/mukherjee07soundInventory.html}
}

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