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We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to the notion of universality as it applies to complex interacting systems in the physical sciences and which establishes a link between generic (universal) patterns at the macroscopic scale and relates them to symmetries at the microscopic scale. By relating the presence and absence of specific symmetries to fundamentally distinct mechanisms for language change at the level of individual speakers and speech acts, we are able to draw conclusions about which of these underlying mechanisms are most likely to be responsible for the changes that actually occur. Since these mechanisms are typically believed to be common to all speakers in all speech communities, this provides a means to relate universals in individual behaviour to language universals.
The temporal statistics exhibited by written correspondence appear to be media dependent, with features which have so far proven difficult to characterize. We explain the origin of these difficulties by disentangling the role of spontaneous activity
Dynamic networks exhibit temporal patterns that vary across different time scales, all of which can potentially affect processes that take place on the network. However, most data-driven approaches used to model time-varying networks attempt to captu
Universality or near-universality of citation distributions was found empirically a decade ago but its theoretical justification has been lacking so far. Here, we systematically study citation distributions for different disciplines in order to chara
Phenomena as diverse as breeding bird populations, the size of U.S. firms, money invested in mutual funds, the GDP of individual countries and the scientific output of universities all show unusual but remarkably similar growth fluctuations. The fluc
Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state in which