[paper read] No country for old members: User lifecycle and linguistic change in online communities

Use language models to analyze the user-level and community level language changes.

Claims that user's susceptibility(敏感性)to lexicon innovation increases in the adolescence and then drops in later community life span.

Reading "The language instinct" by steven pinker

Chapter 1

The author's opinion: language ability is instinct of human. Just like spinning web of spiders. Not molded by the surrounding culture.

The idea is deeply influenced by Chomsky.

If this is true, computer scientist will like it very much. If reinforcement learning can make machine learn to balance, to walk. Maybe one day, machines can learn to talk.

Question: but why some words only occurs in some cultures. Such as "幸灾乐祸" in Chinese and "gloat" in Germany. It can be translated into "to take a mischievous pleasure in sth."


Chapter2

The author's opinion: innate language. One evidence is pidgin to Creole. So children can automatically create grammar? I thought they learned from parents, surrounding people. But the author's opinion is that even just given pidgin by parents, they can make the grammar more perfect->Creole.

"Grammatical" means well-formed according to consistent rules in the dialect of the speakers.

Chapter 4 How language works
Talks about the Grammar of the languages, the author's opinion is that grammar is not learned.

Some funny jokes caused by mixing entries of verbs:

"call me a taxi." "OK, you are a taxi"

"We don't serve colored people."
"That's fine."
"I don't eat colored people. I'd like a piece of chicken."