What are the determinants of survival curves of words?
An evolutionary linguistics approach
An evolutionary approach to historical linguistics can be enlightening when not only the mechanisms, but also the
statistical methods are considered from neighboring disciplines. In this short paper, we apply survival analysis to investigate
what factors determine the lifespan of words. Our case study is on post-classical Greek from the 4th century bc to the beginning of
the 8th century ad. We find that lower frequency and phonetically longer lexemes suffer earlier deaths. Furthermore, verbs turn
out to have higher survival rates than adjectives and nouns.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Methods and data
- 3.Results and discussion
- 4.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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