Publications
Publication details [#48139]
Wang, William S.-Y. and Mieko Ogura. 2008. Dynamic dialectology and social networks. In Gotti, Maurizio, Marina Dossena and Richard Dury, eds. English Historical Linguistics 2006. Selected papers from the fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21–25 August 2006. Volume III: Geo-Historical Variation in English. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 297). John Benjamins. pp. 131–151.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
This paper examines how different structures of social networks affect linguistic selection type of change or functionally biased change, and game type of change or socially biased change, based on simulation and historical data from English. It shows that the weaker the functional or social bias, the greater the effects of different network structures on diffusion processes of change. It also shows that the weaker the functional or social bias, the more probabilistic the learner becomes, and the stronger the functional or social bias, the more categorical the learner becomes. Furthermore, it is discussed that there is little increase in diffusion time with the increase in population size in a small-world and scale-free networks.