Development of Gender Classifications: Modeling the Historical Change from Latin to French

We present and analyze the results of a connectionist simulation which modeled the reanalysis of the Latin gender system in its transition to Old French. The network reanalysis was based solely on formal cues (word endings and analogy with other words) and on frequency. The results are in accordance with the historical data, and certain errors in simulations are also amenable to principled explanations. Simulations improve dramatically when the networks incorporate information about the Celtic substrate which presumably interfered with gender assignment in Gallo-Romance. This finding has a bearing on issues of gender assignment and processing in bilinguals. Simulations also improve with the introduction of more elaborate recurrent networks, which suggests implications for future connectionist modeling. In particular, the results could be applied to the modeling of gender change in other Romance languages and to the modeling of comparative Romance gender systems. The method proposed here would be advantageous for such simulations since it allows the modeler to take into account a rich variety of facts reflecting actual linguistic history.

[1]  Rebecca Posner,et al.  The Romance Languages , 1966 .

[2]  Rosamond Mckitterick.  The Carolingians And The Written Word , 1991 .

[3]  D. Slobin.  Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar , 1973 .

[4]  A. Meillet,et al.  Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue Latine : histoire des mots , 1942 .

[5]  D. Kibbee,et al.  A History of the French Language through Texts , 1995 .

[6]  J. Whatmough,et al.  The dialects of ancient Gaul , 1970 .

[7]  J. Elman,et al.  Learning and morphological change , 1995, Cognition.

[8]  Jay H. Jasanoff.  Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics , 1988 .

[9]  Philip Baldi,et al.  The foundations of Latin , 1999 .

[10]  William Rothwell,et al.  From Latin to modern French , 1985 .

[11]  W. Lambert,et al.  The French Speaker's Skill with Grammatical Gender: An Example of Rule-Governed Behavior , 1977 .

[12]  Paul D. Allopenna,et al.  Tracking the Time Course of Spoken Word Recognition Using Eye Movements: Evidence for Continuous Mapping Models , 1998 .

[13]  Wolfgang Butzkamm,et al.  The sun is feminine. A study on the language acquisition in bilingual children , 1984 .

[14]  B. Joseph.  On the Animate Inanimate Distinction in Cree. , 1979 .

[15]  C. Craig.  Noun classes and categorization , 1986 .

[16]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  The Sound Pattern of English , 1968 .

[17]  Traute Taeschner,et al.  The Sun Is Feminine: A Study on Language Acquisition in Bilingual Children , 1983 .

[18]  Charles X. Ling,et al.  Learning the Past Tense of English Verbs: The Symbolic Pattern Associator vs. Connectionist Models , 1993, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[19]  Henry Brighton,et al.  Compositional Syntax From Cultural Transmission , 2002, Artificial Life.

[20]  V. Marchman,et al.  U-shaped learning and frequency effects in a multi-layered perception: Implications for child language acquisition , 1991, Cognition.

[21]  Jeffrey L. Elman,et al.  Finding Structure in Time , 1990, Cogn. Sci..

[22]  D. Slobin,et al.  The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition , 2000 .

[23]  Susanne Carroll,et al.  The hidden dangers of computer modelling: remarks on Sokolik and Smith's connectionist learning model of French gender , 1995 .

[24]  Janet L Nicol,et al.  One Mind, Two Languages: Bilingual Language Processing. Explaining Linguistics. , 2001 .

[25]  C. F. Hockett.  A Course in Modern Linguistics , 1959 .

[26]  David C. Plaut,et al.  Computational Modeling of Word Reading , Acquired Dyslexia , and Remediation , 1998 .

[27]  Joan L. Bybee,et al.  Regular morphology and the lexicon. , 1995 .

[28]  Frédéric Godefroy.  Lexique De L'Ancien Francais , 1976 .

[29]  J. M. Anderson,et al.  Responses of human frontal cortex to surprising events are predicted by formal associative learning theory , 2001, Nature Neuroscience.

[30]  Michael Smith,et al.  Assignment of gender to French nouns in primary and secondary language : a connectionist model , 1992 .

[31]  M. Lejeune,et al.  Textes gaulois et gallo-romains en cursive latine , 1976 .

[32]  Annette Karmiloff-Smith,et al.  A Functional Approach to Child Language: A Study of Determiners and Reference , 1979 .

[33]  M. Lejeune.  Recueil des inscriptions gauloises , 1985 .

[34]  E. Newport,et al.  WORD SEGMENTATION : THE ROLE OF DISTRIBUTIONAL CUES , 1996 .

[35]  Gillian Sankoff,et al.  The Social Life of Language , 1986 .

[36]  K. Demuth,et al.  Niger-Congo noun class and agreement systems in language acquisition and historical change , 1986 .

[37]  Terttu Nevalainen,et al.  Gender in grammar and cognition , 2000 .

[38]  Nigel Vincent,et al.  The Romance Languages , 1988 .

[39]  Harm Pinkster,et al.  Latin syntax and semantics , 1990 .

[40]  Laura A. Michaelis,et al.  Cognition and Function in Language , 1999 .

[41]  D. Slobin,et al.  Studies of child language development , 1973 .

[42]  Joan L. Bybee.  Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form , 1985 .

[43]  Walther von Wartburg.  Évolution et structure de la langue française , 1936 .

[44]  J. Mandler.  Perceptual and Conceptual Processes in Infancy , 2000 .

[45]  F. Grosjean.  The Bilingual's Language Modes. , 2001 .

[46]  H. Pedersen.  Vergleichende Grammatik der keltischen Sprachen , 1976 .

[47]  Rosamond McKitterick,et al.  The Carolingians and the Written Word. , 1991 .

[48]  M. Studdert-Kennedy,et al.  Approaches To The Evolution Of Language: Social And Cognitive Bases , 1998 .

[49]  M. Cohen,et al.  Histoire d'une Langue: le Francais , 1948 .

[50]  S Pinker,et al.  Overregularization in language acquisition. , 1992, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[51]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition, vol. 1: foundations , 1986 .

[52]  David A. Zubin,et al.  Gender and Folk Taxonomy: The Indexical Relation Between Grammatical and Lexical Categorization , 1986 .

[53]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  Implementations are not conceptualizations: Revising the verb learning model , 1991, Cognition.

[54]  Veikko Vaananen,et al.  Introduction au latin vulgaire , 1969 .

[55]  M. Walsh,et al.  Language and Culture in Aboriginal Australia , 1995 .

[56]  Michael Walsh,et al.  Classifying the World in an Aboriginal Language , 1993 .

[57]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants′ Sensitivity to the Sound Patterns of Native Language Words , 1993 .

[58]  Carol Lynn Moder.  Productivity and categorization in morphological classes , 1992 .

[59]  George Lakoff,et al.  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things , 1987 .

[60]  Simon Kirby,et al.  Function, Selection, and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals , 1999 .

[61]  D. Slobin.  The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition , 1987 .

[62]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants' sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in the native language. , 1994 .

[63]  E. Rabiet,et al.  Grammaire des langues romanes , 1974 .

[64]  Ruth A. Berman,et al.  The acquisition of Hebrew. , 1985 .

[65]  Simon Kirby,et al.  Natural Language From Artificial Life , 2002, Artificial Life.

[66]  Laurie Beth Feldman,et al.  Morphological aspects of language processing. , 1997 .

[67]  Peter Hagoort,et al.  When Does Gender Constrain Parsing? Evidence from ERPs , 1999 .

[68]  T. Brown,et al.  The Carolingians and the Written Word , 1991 .

[69]  Frank Nuessel,et al.  Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France , 1982 .

[70]  V. Marchman,et al.  From rote learning to system building: acquiring verb morphology in children and connectionist nets , 1993, Cognition.

[71]  Nicholas J. Reid,et al.  Nominal classification in aboriginal Australia , 1997 .

[72]  G. Kane.  Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, vol 1: Foundations, vol 2: Psychological and Biological Models , 1994 .

[73]  Michael Gasser,et al.  Learning Words in Time: Towards a Modular Connectionist Account of the Acquisition of Receptive Morphology , 1993 .

[74]  Greville G. Corbett,et al.  Gender in Russian: an account of gender specification and its relationship to declension , 1982 .

[75]  Paul Bernard Diederich,et al.  The frequency of Lation words and their endings , 1939 .

[76]  Steven Davis,et al.  Connectionism: theory and practice , 1992 .

[77]  R N Aslin,et al.  Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants , 1996, Science.

[78]  Ezra Van Everbroeck,et al.  Language type frequency and learnability from a connectionist perspective , 2003 .