engleski

An Overview of Language Networks: Case of Croatian

Viewed as a unique, biologically-based human faculty, language has been recognized as the reflection of the human cognitive capacities, both in terms of its structure and its computational characteristics. Studying languages at intra- and cross-linguistic levels is of paramount importance in relation to our biological, cultural, historical and social beings. Hence, human languages, besides still being our main tools of communication, reflect our history and culture. Language can be seen as a complex adaptive system, evolving in parallel with our society. The analysis and understanding of language and its complexity is of crucial interest in the modern globalizing world. Various aspects of natural language systems can be represented as complex networks, whose vertices depict linguistic units, while links/edges model their morphosyntactic, semantic and/or pragmatic interactions. Thus the language network can be constructed at various linguistic levels: syntactic, semantic, phonetic, syllabic ect. So far there have been efforts to model the phenomena of various language subsystems and examine their unique function through complex networks. Still, the present endeavors in linguistic network research focus on isolated linguistic subsystems lacking to explain (or even explore) the mechanism of their mutual interaction, interplay or inheritance. Obtaining such findings is critical for deepening our understanding of conceptual universalities in natural languages, especially to shed light on the cognitive representation of the language in the human brain. Therefore, one of the main open questions in linguistic networks is explaining how different language subsystems mutually interact. The complexity of any natural language is contained in the interplay among several language levels. Below the word-level, it is possible to explore the type of phonology, morphology and syllabic subsystem complexity. The phonology subsystem complexity is reflected in the morphology subsystem complexity. On the word- level, the morphology subsystem complexity reflects in the complexity of the word order, syntactic rules and the ambiguity of lexis. Since the word order can be considered as the primary factor (but not the only) that determines linguistic structure, it is important to explore the subsystems’ interactions by which it is influenced. The overview of language networks will be revealed by means of the Croatian by showing the properties of five language subsystems: co-occurrence, syntax and shuffled layers (on the word level) and syllabic and grapheme layer (on the sub-word level).

language networks; complex networks

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