arXiv:2504.11770cs.CL2025-04

仅凭发音信息,就能无监督发现英语词源的德国语与拉丁语集群。

Unsupervised Classification of English Words Based on Phonological Information: Discovery of Germanic and Latinate Clusters

  • 基于单词发音模式做无监督聚类,自动发现词源分组。
  • 聚类结果与已知词源分类高度吻合,且复现了语言学规律。
  • 方法通用性强,适用于跨语言词源结构挖掘。

跨语言地,本族词与借词遵循不同的音系规则。以英语为例,日耳曼语源词与拉丁语源词具有不同的重音模式,且双宾语句式主要与日耳曼语动词相关,而非拉丁语源动词。然而从语言习得角度看,这种基于词源的归纳存在可习得性问题,因词的历史来源对普通学习者而言不可见。本研究通过计算证据表明,英语词汇中日耳曼语与拉丁语的区分可从单个词的音系特征中学习。我们对语料库提取的词进行了无监督聚类,所得词簇与词源分类高度一致。模型发现的簇还复现了文献中关于对应词源类别的多种语言学规律。此外,模型还揭示了此前未被注意的准词源簇特征。结合先前对日语的研究结果,这些发现表明该方法为从词汇音系线索中发现词源结构提供了一种通用、跨语言的途径。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Cross-linguistically, native words and loanwords follow different phonological rules. In English, for example, words of Germanic and Latinate origin exhibit different stress patterns, and a certain syntactic structure, double-object datives, is predominantly associated with Germanic verbs rather than Latinate verbs. From the perspective of language acquisition, however, such etymology-based generalizations raise learnability concerns, since the historical origins of words are presumably inaccessible information for general language learners. In this study, we present computational evidence indicating that the Germanic-Latinate distinction in the English lexicon is learnable from the phonotactic information of individual words. Specifically, we performed an unsupervised clustering on corpus-extracted words, and the resulting word clusters largely aligned with the etymological distinction. The model-discovered clusters also recovered various linguistic generalizations documented in the previous literature regarding the corresponding etymological classes. Moreover, our model also uncovered previously unrecognized features of the quasi-etymological clusters. Taken together with prior results from Japanese, our findings indicate that the proposed method provides a general, cross-linguistic approach to discovering etymological structure from phonotactic cues in the lexicon.

词源分析音系学无监督学习

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