Englisches Seminar, room 13
Connections in the mental lexicon: On the distribution of phonetic features
In this talk I will present data from an ongoing project concerning statistical tendencies in the distribution of phonemes and phonetic features in English. Using two different types of co-occurrence analyses (word embeddings and ngrams/collocations), I will demonstrate that these distributions are not random – contrary to what the traditional view of the arbitrary linguistic sign would suggest. The talk is intended to spark discussion regarding the potential explanations for these effects as well as regarding the relationship between arbitrariness and systematicity in language.
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