Connectivity, Not Frequency, Determines the Fate of a Morpheme

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 8; no. 7; p. e69945
• Main Authors: Keller, Daniela Barbara, Schultz, Jörg
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 29.07.2013; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: 18th century; 20th century; Bioinformatics; Biology; Computational Biology; Computer programs; Decomposition; Dictionaries; Equivalence; Evolution; Family size; Frequency of occurrence; German language; Humans; Language; Language change; Linguistics; Memory; Mental representation; Morphemes; Morphological analysis; Morphology; Phonetics; Social and Behavioral Sciences; Vocabulary; Words; Germany
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0069945

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful parts of words and therefore represent a natural unit to study the evolution of words. To analyze the influence of language change on morphemes, we performed a large scale analysis of German and English vocabulary covering the last 200 years. Using a network approach from bioinformatics, we examined the historical dynamics of morphemes, the fixation of new morphemes and the emergence of words containing existing morphemes. We found that these processes are driven mainly by the number of different direct neighbors of a morpheme in words (connectivity, an equivalent to family size or type frequency) and not its frequency of usage (equivalent to token frequency). This contrasts words, whose survival is determined by their frequency of usage. We therefore identified features of morphemes which are not dictated by the statistical properties of words. As morphemes are also relevant for the mental representation of words, this result might enable establishing a link between an individual's perception of language and historical language change.