A new approach to concept basicness and stability as a window to the robustness of concept list rankings
A new approach to concept basicness and stability as a window to the robustness of concept list rankings
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DOI：
10.1163/22105832-00802001
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发表时间：
2018-01-01
影响因子：
0.7
通讯作者：
Buch, Armin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Dellert, Johannes;Buch, Armin
基于最近出版的大型词典统计数据库，我们排名1,016个概念，其适合列入Swadesh风格的基本稳定的概念列表。为此，我们定义了基本性和稳定性的单独度量。在形态简单的意义上的基本性是衡量的基础上的信息内容，概括的词的长度，纠正扭曲的影响，音素库存大小，音位和非词干词素的字典形式。通过对独立的语言对进行抽样，并将概念的形式之间的距离与整体语言距离相关联，来衡量语义转移或借用的稳定性。为了确定基本性和稳定性的相对重要性，我们优化了我们的两个部分措施与现有列表的相似性的组合。现有排名之间的比较表明，概念排名高度依赖数据，因此不如以前假设的那么有根据。为了探讨这个问题，我们评估了我们的排名对语言对restaurant的鲁棒性，使我们能够评估有多少波动可以预期，并显示，只有大约一半的概念列表上的基础上，我们的排名可以安全地假设属于独立的数据列表。
Based on a recently published large-scale lexicostatistical database, we rank 1,016 concepts by their suitability for inclusion in Swadesh-style lists of basic stable concepts. For this, we define separate measures of basicness and stability. Basicness in the sense of morphological simplicity is measured based on information content, a generalization of word length which corrects for distorting effects of phoneme inventory sizes, phonotactics and non-stem morphemes in dictionary forms. Stability against replacement by semantic shift or borrowing is measured by sampling independent language pairs, and correlating the distances between the forms for the concept with the overall language distances. In order to determine the relative importance of basicness and stability, we optimize our combination of the two partial measures towards similarity with existing lists. A comparison with and among existing rankings suggests that concept rankings are highly data-dependent and therefore less well-grounded than previously assumed. To explore this issue, we evaluate the robustness of our ranking against language pair resampling, allowing us to assess how much volatility can be expected, and showing that only about half of the concepts on a list based on our ranking can safely be assumed to belong on the list independently of the data.