Skip to main content
PMC home page
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences logoLink to Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
. 2001 Dec 22;268(1485):2603–2606. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2001.1824

Language as an evolving word web.

S N Dorogovtsev 1, J F Mendes 1
PMCID: PMC1088922  PMID: 11749717

Abstract

Human language may be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and interacting words in sentences are connected by edges. The empirical distribution of the number of connections of words in this network is of a peculiar form that includes two pronounced power-law regions. Here we propose a theory of the evolution of language, which treats language as a self-organizing network of interacting words. In the framework of this concept, we completely describe the observed word web structure without any fitting. We show that the two regimes in the distribution naturally emerge from the evolutionary dynamics of the word web. It follows from our theory that the size of the core part of language, the 'kernel lexicon', does not vary as language evolves.

Full Text

The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (114.2 KB).

Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

  1. Albert R, Barabasi AL. Topology of evolving networks: local events and universality. Phys Rev Lett. 2000 Dec 11;85(24):5234–5237. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.85.5234. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  2. Albert R, Jeong H, Barabasi AL. Error and attack tolerance of complex networks. Nature. 2000 Jul 27;406(6794):378–382. doi: 10.1038/35019019. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  3. Barabasi AL, Albert R. Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science. 1999 Oct 15;286(5439):509–512. doi: 10.1126/science.286.5439.509. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  4. Dorogovtsev S. N., Mendes J. F. Effect of the accelerating growth of communications networks on their structure. Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2001 Jan 18;63(2 Pt 2):025101–025101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.63.025101. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  5. Dorogovtsev S. N., Mendes J. F., Samukhin A. N. Structure of growing networks with preferential linking. Phys Rev Lett. 2000 Nov 20;85(21):4633–4636. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.85.4633. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  6. Huberman BA, Pirolli PLT, Pitkow JE, Lukose RM. Strong regularities in world wide web surfing . Science. 1998 Apr 3;280(5360):95–97. doi: 10.1126/science.280.5360.95. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  7. Hulata E., Segev R., Shapira Y., Benveniste M., Ben-Jacob E. Detection and sorting of neural spikes using wavelet packets. Phys Rev Lett. 2000 Nov 20;85(21):4637–4640. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.85.4637. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  8. Jeong H., Tombor B., Albert R., Oltvai Z. N., Barabási A. L. The large-scale organization of metabolic networks. Nature. 2000 Oct 5;407(6804):651–654. doi: 10.1038/35036627. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  9. Lawrence S., Giles C. L. Accessibility of information on the web. Nature. 1999 Jul 8;400(6740):107–109. doi: 10.1038/21987. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  10. Lawrence S, Giles CL. Searching the world wide Web . Science. 1998 Apr 3;280(5360):98–100. doi: 10.1126/science.280.5360.98. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  11. Newman M. E. The structure of scientific collaboration networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2001 Jan 9;98(2):404–409. doi: 10.1073/pnas.021544898. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  12. Nowak M. A., Komarova N. L., Niyogi P. Evolution of universal grammar. Science. 2001 Jan 5;291(5501):114–118. doi: 10.1126/science.291.5501.114. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  13. Nowak M. A., Krakauer D. C. The evolution of language. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1999 Jul 6;96(14):8028–8033. doi: 10.1073/pnas.96.14.8028. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  14. Nowak M. A., Plotkin J. B., Jansen V. A. The evolution of syntactic communication. Nature. 2000 Mar 30;404(6777):495–498. doi: 10.1038/35006635. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  15. Nowak M. A. The basic reproductive ratio of a word, the maximum size of a lexicon. J Theor Biol. 2000 May 21;204(2):179–189. doi: 10.1006/jtbi.2000.1085. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  16. Roemer I., Grützner F., Winking H., Haaf T., Orth A., Skidmore L., Antczak D., Fundele R. Genome evolution. Global methylation in eutherian hybrids. Nature. 1999 Sep 9;401(6749):131–132. doi: 10.1038/43607. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  17. Strogatz S. H. Exploring complex networks. Nature. 2001 Mar 8;410(6825):268–276. doi: 10.1038/35065725. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  18. Watts D. J., Strogatz S. H. Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks. Nature. 1998 Jun 4;393(6684):440–442. doi: 10.1038/30918. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  19. Williams R. J., Martinez N. D. Simple rules yield complex food webs. Nature. 2000 Mar 9;404(6774):180–183. doi: 10.1038/35004572. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Articles from Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences are provided here courtesy of The Royal Society

RESOURCES