Valence-dependent mutation in lexical evolution

Joshua Conrad Jackson (), Kristen Lindquist, Ryan Drabble, Quentin Atkinson and Joseph Watts
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Joshua Conrad Jackson: Northwestern University
Kristen Lindquist: University of North Carolina
Ryan Drabble: University of North Carolina
Quentin Atkinson: University of Auckland
Joseph Watts: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Nature Human Behaviour, 2023, vol. 7, issue 2, 190-199

Abstract: Abstract A central goal of linguistics is to understand how words evolve. Past research has found that macro-level factors such as frequency of word usage and population size explain the pace of lexical evolution. Here we focus on cognitive and affective factors, testing whether valence (positivity–negativity) explains lexical evolution rates. Using estimates of cognate replacement rates for 200 concepts on an Indo-European language tree spanning six to ten millennia, we find that negative valence correlates with faster cognate replacement. This association holds when controlling for frequency of use, and follow-up analyses show that it is most robust for adjectives (‘dirty’ versus ‘clean’; ‘bad’ versus ‘good’); it does not consistently reach statistical significance for verbs, and never reaches significance for nouns. We also present experiments showing that individuals are more likely to replace words for negative versus positive concepts. Our findings suggest that emotional valence affects micro-level guided variation, which drives macro-level valence-dependent mutation in adjectives.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01483-8

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