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Valence-dependent mutation in lexical evolution

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 190–199 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

A central goal of linguistics is to understand how words evolve. Past research has found that macro-level factors such as frequency of word usage and population size explain the pace of lexical evolution. Here we focus on cognitive and affective factors, testing whether valence (positivity–negativity) explains lexical evolution rates. Using estimates of cognate replacement rates for 200 concepts on an Indo-European language tree spanning six to ten millennia, we find that negative valence correlates with faster cognate replacement. This association holds when controlling for frequency of use, and follow-up analyses show that it is most robust for adjectives (‘dirty’ versus ‘clean’; ‘bad’ versus ‘good’); it does not consistently reach statistical significance for verbs, and never reaches significance for nouns. We also present experiments showing that individuals are more likely to replace words for negative versus positive concepts. Our findings suggest that emotional valence affects micro-level guided variation, which drives macro-level valence-dependent mutation in adjectives.

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Fig. 1: The relationship between semantic valence and cognate replacement rate in four Indo-European languages.
Fig. 2: The meta-analytic relationship between valence and cognate replacement rate for different parts of speech.
Fig. 3: The relationship between population-level cognate replacement and individual-level word replacement.

Data availability

Our project page at https://osf.io/f86wt/ displays all data from this paper. Our analyses used external data from WOLD (https://wold.clld.org/) and from Pagel, Atkinson and Meade (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06176?message=remove&pagewanted=all).

Code availability

Our project page at https://osf.io/f86wt/ displays all code from this paper.

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Acknowledgements

J.W. thanks the Marsden Foundation of New Zealand (19-UOO-1932) for funding. The Marsden foundation played no role in the conceptualization, design, analysis or decision to publish this research. The authors thank I. Khismatova for research assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Joshua Conrad Jackson

  2. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Kristen Lindquist & Ryan Drabble

  3. School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Quentin Atkinson

  4. Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

    Quentin Atkinson & Joseph Watts

  5. Religion Programme, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Joseph Watts

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Contributions

J.C.J. conceptualized the study, analysed the data and co-wrote the manuscript. K.L. co-wrote the manuscript. R.D. collected the data. Q.A. co-wrote the manuscript. J.W. conceptualized the study and co-wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Joshua Conrad Jackson.

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Jackson, J.C., Lindquist, K., Drabble, R. et al. Valence-dependent mutation in lexical evolution. Nat Hum Behav 7, 190–199 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01483-8

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