The verb inflections of Bengali underwenta series of phonological change between 10th and 18th centuries, which gave rise to several modern dialects of the language. In this paper, we offer a functional explanation for this change by quantifying the functional pressures of ease of articulation, perceptual contrast and learnability through objective functions or constraints, or both. The multi-objective and multi-constraint optimization problem has

been solved through genetic algorithm, whereby we have observed the emergence of Pareto-optimal dialects in the system that closely resemble some of the real ones.

In  Proceedings of ACL SIGMORPHON9

Publisher  Association for Computational Linguistics
All copyrights reserved by ACL 2007

Details