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Abstract

The verb inflections of Bengali underwent a series of phonological change between 10th and 18th centuries, which gave rise to several modern dialects of the language. In this paper, we offer a functional explanation for this change by quantifying the functional pressures of ease of articulation, perceptual contrast and learnability through objective functions or constraints, or both. The multi-objective and multi-constraint optimization problem has been solved through genetic algorithm, whereby we have observed the emergence of Pareto-optimal dialects in the system that closely resemble some of the real ones.

@inproceedings{choudhury07sigmorphon,
  author={Monojit Choudhury and Vaibhav Jalan and Sudeshna Sarkar and Anupam Basu},
  title={Evolution, optimization and language change: the case of Bengali verb inflections},
  year={2007},
  month={June},
  address={Prague},
  booktitle={Proceedings of Ninth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Morphology and Phonology},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/choudhury07sigmorphon.html}
}

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