Morphogenetic and Morpheme Network to Structured Worlds

Abstract

In Fig. 4.1 we show the chaotic structure of the language before the building of the network of morphology. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful parts of words and therefore represent a natural unit to study the evolution of words. Using a network approach from bioinformatics, we examine the historical dynamics of morphemes, the fixation of new morphemes and the emergence of words containing existing morphemes. We find that these processes are driven mainly by the number of different direct neighbors of a morpheme in words (connectivity, an equivalent to family size or type frequency) and not its frequency of usage (equivalent to token frequency).