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URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0610120v4

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Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0610120

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Abstract

The sound inventories of the world's languages self-organize themselves giving rise to similar cross-linguistic patterns. In this work we attempt to capture this phenomenon of self-organization, which shapes the structure of the consonant inventories, through a complex network approach. For this purpose we define the occurrence and co-occurrence networks of consonants and systematically study some of their important topological properties. A crucial observation is that the occurrence as well as the co-occurrence of consonants across languages follow a power law distribution. This property is arguably a consequence of the principle of preferential attachment. In order to support this argument we propose a synthesis model which reproduces the degree distribution for the networks to a close approximation. We further observe that the co-occurrence network of consonants show a high degree of clustering and subsequently refine our synthesis model in order to incorporate this property. Finally, we discuss how preferential attachment manifests itself through the evolutionary nature of language.

@article{Mukherjee07soundInventory,
  author={Animesh Mukherjee and Monojit Choudhury and Anupam Basu and Niloy Ganguly},
  title={Self-organization of the Sound Inventories: Analysis and Synthesis of the Occurrence and Co-occurrence Networks of Consonants},
  journal={Journal of Quantitative Linguistics},
  year={forthcoming},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/Mukherjee07soundInventory.html}
}