Towards a computational model of grammaticalization and lexical diversity
Christian Bentz, Paula J. Buttery · 2014
Languages use different lexical inven-tories to encode information, ranging from small sets of simplex words to large sets of morphologically complex words. Grammaticalization theories argue that this variation arises as the outcome of diachronic processes whereby co-occurring words merge to one word and build up complex morphology. To model these pro-cesses we present a) a quantitative measure of lexical diversity and b) a preliminary computational model of changes in lexical diversity over several generations of merging higly frequent collocates. 1