Richard A Blythe
Biographic Data
| ID | 811996 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard A Blythe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard A |
| FAMILY NAME | Blythe |
| SIGNATURE | BLYTHE R A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8160-5068 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 125 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Broadening undergraduate university admission pathways
The global demand for higher education has resulted in government imperatives and policies aimed to increase student participation from under-represented groups, such as those who reside outside urban areas and from low socio-economic backgrounds. In Australia, the recent Universities Accord report (2024) signals achieving a larger, fairer higher education system with broadening of access. Thus, it is timely to examine the mechanisms that may hav…
Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora
Newberry et al. (Detecting evolutionary forces in language change, Nature 551, 2017) tackle an important but difficult problem in linguistics, the testing of selective theories of language change against a null model of drift. Having applied a test from population genetics (the Frequency Increment Test) to a number of relevant examples, they suggest stochasticity has a previously under-appreciated role in language evolution. We replicate their re…
Quantifying the dynamics of topical fluctuations in language
The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements in texts, with changes in frequency taken to reflect the popularity or selective fitness of an element. However, corpus frequencies may change for a wide variety of reasons, including purely random sampling ef…
Momentum in Language Change
Like other socially transmitted traits, human languages undergo cultural evolution. While humans can replicate linguistic conventions to a high degree of fidelity, sometimes established conventions get replaced by new variants, with the gradual replacement following the trajectory of an s-shaped curve. Although previous modelling work suggests that only a bias favoring the replication of new linguistic variants can reliably reproduce the dynamics…
S-curves and the mechanisms of propagation in language change
A variety of mechanisms have been proposed in sociolinguistics for the propagation of an innovation through the speech community. The complexity of social systems makes it difficult to evaluate the different mechanisms empirically. We use the four-way typology of mechanisms proposed by Baxter and colleagues (), and define them mathematically in such a way that the effects of different mechanisms in the trajectory of a change can be modeled. The m…
Modeling language change
Trudgill (2004) proposed that the emergence of New Zealand English, and of isolated new dialects generally, is purely deterministic. It can be explained solely in terms of the frequency of occurrence of particular variants and the frequency of interactions between different speakers in the society. Trudgill's theory is closely related to usage-based models of language, in which frequency plays a role in the representation of linguistic knowledge …
The Speech Community in Evolutionary Language Dynamics
Language is a complex adaptive system: Speakers are agents who interact with each other, and their past and current interactions feed into speakers' future behavior in complex ways. In this article, we describe the social cognitive linguistic basis for this analysis of language and a mathematical model developed in collaboration between researchers in linguistics and statistical physics. The model has led us to posit two mechanisms of selection-n…
Language Is a Complex Adaptive System
Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of human interaction along with domain-general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language. Recent research in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use strongly affect how language is acquired, is used, and changes. These processes are not independent of one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system (CAS). Language as a CAS involves …
Language Is a Complex Adaptive System
Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of human interaction along with domain-general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language. Recent research in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use strongly affect how language is acquired, is used, and changes. These processes are not independent of one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system (CAS). Language as a CAS involves …
Modeling language change
Trudgill (2004) proposed that the emergence of New Zealand English, and of isolated new dialects generally, is purely deterministic. It can be explained solely in terms of the frequency of occurrence of particular variants and the frequency of interactions between different speakers in the society. Trudgill's theory is closely related to usage-based models of language, in which frequency plays a role in the representation of linguistic knowledge …
S-curves and the mechanisms of propagation in language change
A variety of mechanisms have been proposed in sociolinguistics for the propagation of an innovation through the speech community. The complexity of social systems makes it difficult to evaluate the different mechanisms empirically. We use the four-way typology of mechanisms proposed by Baxter and colleagues (), and define them mathematically in such a way that the effects of different mechanisms in the trajectory of a change can be modeled. The m…
Momentum in Language Change
Like other socially transmitted traits, human languages undergo cultural evolution. While humans can replicate linguistic conventions to a high degree of fidelity, sometimes established conventions get replaced by new variants, with the gradual replacement following the trajectory of an s-shaped curve. Although previous modelling work suggests that only a bias favoring the replication of new linguistic variants can reliably reproduce the dynamics…
Modeling language change
Trudgill (2004) proposed that the emergence of New Zealand English, and of isolated new dialects generally, is purely deterministic. It can be explained solely in terms of the frequency of occurrence of particular variants and the frequency of interactions between different speakers in the society. Trudgill's theory is closely related to usage-based models of language, in which frequency plays a role in the representation of linguistic knowledge …
The Speech Community in Evolutionary Language Dynamics
Language is a complex adaptive system: Speakers are agents who interact with each other, and their past and current interactions feed into speakers' future behavior in complex ways. In this article, we describe the social cognitive linguistic basis for this analysis of language and a mathematical model developed in collaboration between researchers in linguistics and statistical physics. The model has led us to posit two mechanisms of selection-n…
Language Is a Complex Adaptive System
Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of human interaction along with domain-general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language. Recent research in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use strongly affect how language is acquired, is used, and changes. These processes are not independent of one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system (CAS). Language as a CAS involves …
S-curves and the mechanisms of propagation in language change
A variety of mechanisms have been proposed in sociolinguistics for the propagation of an innovation through the speech community. The complexity of social systems makes it difficult to evaluate the different mechanisms empirically. We use the four-way typology of mechanisms proposed by Baxter and colleagues (), and define them mathematically in such a way that the effects of different mechanisms in the trajectory of a change can be modeled. The m…
Momentum in Language Change
Like other socially transmitted traits, human languages undergo cultural evolution. While humans can replicate linguistic conventions to a high degree of fidelity, sometimes established conventions get replaced by new variants, with the gradual replacement following the trajectory of an s-shaped curve. Although previous modelling work suggests that only a bias favoring the replication of new linguistic variants can reliably reproduce the dynamics…
Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora
Newberry et al. (Detecting evolutionary forces in language change, Nature 551, 2017) tackle an important but difficult problem in linguistics, the testing of selective theories of language change against a null model of drift. Having applied a test from population genetics (the Frequency Increment Test) to a number of relevant examples, they suggest stochasticity has a previously under-appreciated role in language evolution. We replicate their re…
Quantifying the dynamics of topical fluctuations in language
The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements in texts, with changes in frequency taken to reflect the popularity or selective fitness of an element. However, corpus frequencies may change for a wide variety of reasons, including purely random sampling ef…
Broadening undergraduate university admission pathways
The global demand for higher education has resulted in government imperatives and policies aimed to increase student participation from under-represented groups, such as those who reside outside urban areas and from low socio-economic backgrounds. In Australia, the recent Universities Accord report (2024) signals achieving a larger, fairer higher education system with broadening of access. Thus, it is timely to examine the mechanisms that may hav…
Language and cultural evolution (7 works) · Language change (4 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (4 works) · Authorship Attribution and Profiling (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Linguistics (3 works) · Artificial Intelligence (2 works) · Artificial Intelligence (2 works) · Language evolution (2 works) · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence (2 works)