Colloquium: Hierarchy of scales in language dynamics

Richard Blythe ()

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 2015, vol. 88, issue 11, 1-18

Abstract: Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a variety of levels of description, from the behaviour of individual agents learning simple artificial languages from each other, up to changes in the structure of languages shared by large groups of speakers over historical timescales. In this Colloquium, we survey a hierarchy of scales at which language and linguistic behaviour can be described, along with the main progress in understanding that has been made at each of them − much of which has come from the statistical physics community. We argue that future developments may arise by linking the different levels of the hierarchy together in a more coherent fashion, in particular where this allows more effective use of rich empirical data sets. Copyright The Author(s) 2015

Keywords: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1140/epjb/e2015-60347-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurphb:v:88:y:2015:i:11:p:1-18:10.1140/epjb/e2015-60347-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10051

DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2015-60347-3

Access Statistics for this article

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems is currently edited by P. Hänggi and Angel Rubio

More articles in The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems from Springer, EDP Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().