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IV. Ecosmomics: Independent, UniVersal, Complex Network Systems and a Genetic Code-Script Source

3. Iteracy: A Rosetta Ecosmos Textuality

Cong, Jin and Haitao Liu. Approaching Human Language with Complex Networks. Physics of Life Reviews. Online April, 2014. In this day of instant worldwide access to technical literature, collaboration, and publication, Zhejiang University, China, systems linguists post a comprehensive study to show how such ubiquitous inter-connective phenomena can similarly apply to and distinguish every aspect of communication. With some 200 current references, it conveys how our own vernacular can be found to have roots in and an affinity the deep dynamics of physical nature.

In complement to the reductionist approach as commonly used in modern science, this new science of networks makes it possible to probe into the complexity of real-world systems in their entirety and thus constitutes one, if not the only, solution to the challenge of “reassembling” complex systems and capturing their holistic properties. Indebted substantially to graph theory and statistical physics, the models and quantitative tools employed of real-world networks of various natures and thus facilitate communication between different disciplines. (2)

Coronel-Molina, Serafin and Miguel Rodriguez-Mondonedo. Introduction: Language Contact in the Andes and Universal Grammar. Lingua. 122/5, 2012. Indiana University cultural linguists open a special issue with this title, as if a worldwide personsphere proceeds to reconstruct the myriad yet familial dialects from which it arose. The polyglot Tower of Babel can be coherent again as we find by careful analysis that the many tongues contain a common vernacular. In Rosetta translation, we all speak the same human-earth prose and poetry, which ever invites us altogether to learn to read and avail.

In this paper we offer a panoramic overview of the development of Andean Spanish and Andean Linguistics, from a theoretical point of view of language contact and universal grammar. We discuss how the notion of Andean Spanish came into existence, the issues under debate, and the consequences of different theoretical positions. We also introduce the contents of the papers included in this special issue, and highlight their key points, framing them in the context of the research on universal grammar. The following five areas are covered: (1) the convergence of Quechua and Aymara, (2) the impact of bilingualism on intonation, (3) the sharing of suffixes in contact situations, (4) the modification of the present perfect tense in Spanish in contact with Quechua, and (5) the properties of the Quechua case system from the point of view of contact varieties. Finally, we provide some remarks on bilingual education, and some suggestions for further directions for future research. (Abstract)

Corral, Alvaro, et al. Universal Complex Structures in Written Language. arXiv:0901.2924. Circa 2009, Barcelona informatic linguists Corral, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho and Albert Diaz-Guilera provide an early, prescient recognition that human literature does indeed exemplify these same system dynamics as being found everywhere else in nature and society.

Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf's law of word frequencies. Zipf's law appears to be universal, and may not even be unique to human language. However, there is ongoing controversy over whether Zipf's law is a good indicator of complexity. Here we present an alternative approach that puts Zipf's law in the context of critical phenomena (the cornerstone of complexity in physics) and establishes the presence of a large scale "attraction" between successive repetitions of words. Moreover, this phenomenon is scale-invariant and universal -- the pattern is independent of word frequency and is observed in texts by different authors and written in different languages. There is evidence, however, that the shape of the scaling relation changes for words that play a key role in the text, implying the existence of different "universality classes" in the repetition of words. These behaviours exhibit striking parallels with complex catastrophic phenomena. (Abstract)

Cowley, Stephen. Distributed Language and Dynamics. Pragmatics & Cognition. 17/3, 2009. As an introduction to a special issue, a linguist (see bio below) calls for an overdue shift of social discourse from discrete symbols, words alone, to equally admit integral relationships within broadly-based cultural settings. A mantra “dynamics first, symbolic second” is voiced to distinguish our societal lives as semiotic and literal in essence. Notable papers are “The Experiential Basis of Speech and Writing as Different Cognitive Domains” by Alexander Kravchenko, and “Symbols as Constraints: The Structuring Role of Dynamics and Self-organization in Natural Language” by Joanna Raczaszek-Leonardi. Johns Benjamins will publish this issue as Distributed Language in October 2011, from which the main quote below. What accrues is another realization that greater nature is in fact deeply informational and textual in kind.

The volume presents language as fully integrated with human existence. On this view, language is not essentially ‘symbolic’, not represented inside minds or brains, and most certainly not determined by micro-social rules and norms. Rather, language is part of our ecology. It emerges when bodies co-ordinate vocal and visible gesture to integrate events with different histories. Enacting feeling, expression and wordings, language permeates the collective, individual and affective life of living beings. Distributed language pursues this perspective both theoretically and in relation to empirical work. Empirically, it reports studies on the anticipatory dynamics of reading, its socio-cognitive consequences, Shakespearean theatre, what images evoke (in brain and word), and solving insight problems. Theoretically, the volume challenges linguistic autonomy from overlapping theoretical positions. First, it is argued that language exploits a species specific form of semiotic cognition. Second, it is suggested that the central function of language lies in realizing values that derive from our ecosystemic existence. Third, this is ascribed to how cultural and biological symbols co-regulate the dynamics that shape human activity. Fourth, it is argued that language, far from being organism-centred, gives us an extended ecology in which our co-ordination is saturated by values and norms that are derived from our sociocultural environment.

Stephen Cowley is a Senior Lecturer in Developmental Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, and Research Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He founded and coordinates the Distributed Language Group, a community that aims to transform the language sciences by showing how directed, dialogical activity gives a collective dimension to human intelligence.

De Looze, Laurence. The Letter and the Cosmos: How the Alphabet has Shaped the Western View of the World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. From our worldwide vantage, a University of Western Ontario professor of comparative literature provides a grand retrospect of a definitive human penchant to create symbolic forms and images by which to record, describe, communicate, and to represent in an iconic way a deeply literal reality. The volume dutifully travels from Greece to Rome, the Christian Middle Ages, Humanism, a Universal Language, and onto a reasonable modernity and late post-modernity. As a synopsis, throughout history the incentive and hope was a natural, ordained textuality which might be translated and discerned by way of such a cipher articulation.

DeGiuli, Eric. Random Language Model: A Path to Principled Complexity. arXiv:1809.01201. A University of Sorbonne Paris physicist advances a linguistic understanding of the textual, computational, alphabetic (broadly conceived) essence of natural reality. See also his companion post Emergence of Order in Random Languages at 1902.07516.

Many complex generative systems use languages to create structured objects. We consider a model of random languages, defined by weighted context-free grammars. As the distribution of grammar weights broadens, a transition is found from a random phase, in which sentences are indistinguishable from noise, to an organized phase in which nontrivial information is carried. This marks the emergence of deep structure in the language, and can be understood by a competition between energy and entropy. (1809.01201 Abstract)

It is a remarkable fact that structures of the most astounding complexity can be encoded into sequences of digits from a finite alphabet. Indeed, the complexity of life is written in the genetic code, with alphabet {A,T,C,G}, proteins are coded from strings of 20 amino acids, and human-written text is composed in small, fixed alphabets. This ‘infinite use of finite means’ was formalized by Post and Chomsky with the notion of generative grammar, and has been elaborated upon since by linguists and computer scientists. (1)

We consider languages generated by weighted context-free grammars. It is shown that the behaviour of large texts is controlled by saddle-point equations for an appropriate generating function. We then consider ensembles of grammars, in particular my Random Language Model (above). This model is solved in the replica-symmetric ansatz, which is valid in the high-temperature, disordered phase. It is shown that in the phase in which languages carry information, the replica symmetry must be broken. (1902.07516 Abstract)

Dinesh, T. and S. Uskudarli. Renarration for All. arXiv:1810.12379. A Janastu social activist in Karnataka, India (second quote) and a Bogazici University, Istanbul computer scientist identify and scope out some ways that editorial functions for societal access and clarity ought to be built into the Internet for better communication and comprehension

The accessibility of content for all has been a key goal of the Web since its conception. However, true access to relevant content in the global context has been elusive for reasons beyond physical accessibility. Among them are the spoken languages, literacy levels, expertise, and culture. A renarration relates some Web content with an alternative version by means of transformations like simplification, elaboration, translation, or production of audio and video material. This work presents a model and a basic architecture for supporting renarrations along with various scenarios. (Abstract excerpt)

Janastu, a non-profit organization, has been providing Free Open source Software Solutions and support (FOSS) to small non-profits (NPOs/NGOs) since 2002. This includes one-on-one consulting regarding their information management needs, building their online and offline knowledge bases, providing support to their projects by designing web-sites, configuring news-filters, helping them migrate to open source solutions, help deal with localization and Indian language issues, geographic information collection and necessary R&D.

Drozdz, Stanislaw, et al. Quantifying Origin and Character of Long-Range Correlations in Narrative Texts. Information Sciences. 331/32, 2016. In an analytic survey of over a hundred premier volumes, Polish Academy of Sciences, Jagiellonian University, and Cracow University of Technology complexity theorists find the presence of common, intrinsic, recurrent nonlinear forms and flourishes. A fractal self-similarity, as everywhere else from universe to human, indeed graces the range of historical literature, as the review quote states. See also by this group In Narrative Texts Punctuation Marks Obey the Same Statistics as Words at arXiv:1604.00834.

In natural language using short sentences is considered efficient for communication. However, a text composed exclusively of such sentences looks technical and reads boring. A text composed of long ones, on the other hand, demands significantly more effort for comprehension. Studying characteristics of the sentence length variability (SLV) in a large corpus of world-famous literary texts shows that an appealing and aesthetic optimum appears somewhere in between and involves self-similar, cascade-like alternation of various lengths sentences. An overwhelming majority of the studied texts simply obeys such fractal attributes but especially spectacular in this respect are hypertext-like, stream of consciousness novels. In addition, they appear to develop structures characteristic of irreducibly interwoven sets of fractals called multifractals. (Abstract)

James Joyce, Julio Cortazar, Marcel Proust, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Umberto Eco. Regardless of the language they were working in, some of the world's greatest writers appear to be, in some respects, constructing fractals. Statistical analysis carried out at the Polish Academy of Sciences, however, revealed something even more intriguing. The composition of works from within a particular genre was characterized by the exceptional dynamics of a cascading (avalanche) narrative structure. This type of narrative turns out to be multifractal. That is, fractals of fractals are created. The study involved 113 literary works written in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish by such famous figures as Honore de Balzac, Arthur Conan Doyle, Julio Cortazar, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexandre Dumas, Umberto Eco, George Elliot, Victor Hugo, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Wladyslaw Reymont, William Shakespeare, Henryk Sienkiewicz, JRR Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, among others. (EurekAlert: Global Source for Science News)

Drozdz, Stanislaw, et al. Quantifying Principles of the Narrative Text Formation. arXiv:1412:8319. Polish systems physicists including Jaroslaw Kwapien find hypertext fractal self-similarities across the historic corpus of written literature, which is seen as isomorphic to neural dynamics. See also by this group Modeling the Average Shortest Path in Growth of Word-Adjacency Networks at arXiv:1409.4714.

Enfield, E. J.. Scale in Language. Cognitive Science. 47/10, 2023. A senior University of Sydney linguist makes another case for an innate complex scalar system essence which suffuses our script and speech. Nested, recursive refrain-like patterns course through writings akin to life’s allometric homologies. See also Complex systems approach to natural language by Tomasz Stanisz, et al Physics Reports. (Vol. 1053, 2024) for an extensive companion view.

A concern of the cognitive science of language has been the concept of a linguistic system. This paper offers a novel approach by identifying *scale* as a mooring for the interdisciplinary study of language systems. It defines scale to be larger or smaller in cases such as a phonemic inventory, a word's frequency in a corpus, or a speaker population. We review linguistic typology, grammatical description, morphosyntactics, psycholinguistics, and social network demography. We turn to sites of scale difference in phonologies, grammatical structure (Menzerath's Law), and in corpora (Zipf's Law). (Abstract)

The language ecology as a distributional network To illustrate, I want to consider a theory that has been successful in accounting for scale dependencies in complex systems outside of language. That observation led (Geoffrey) West and colleagues to develop a theory of allometric scaling founded on three unifying ideas. The first is optimization. Optimization is central to the many forms of balance and trade-off inherent in the patterns of dependency. Second, the delivery system is space-filling. The network must supply its materials to every part of the structure that it serves. For example, in a population-level frame, a language fills a social network. The third principle is invariant terminal functional structure.

In conclusion, this review has argued that if we are going to take seriously the idea that language is a complex system akin to an organism or a city—to take two oft-made comparisons—then we must take seriously the significance of scale.

Eroglu, Sertac. Menzerath-Altmann Law: Statistical Mechanical Interpretation as Applied to a Linguistic Organization. Journal of Statistical Physics. 157/2, 2014. In a contribution to the current synthesis of cosmic nature and human literature, the Eskisehur Osmangazi University, Turkey, biophysicist finds this deep structure of language and script has an accord with a self-organizing physical reality. See Khuram Shahzed, et al herein for more on the law and how it shows up everywhere, and Statistical Mechanics of Ontology Based Annotations by David Hoyle and Andrew Brass at arXiv:1605.05402 about its mathematical basis.

The distribution behavior described by the empirical Menzerath–Altmann law is frequently encountered during the self-organization of linguistic and non-linguistic natural organizations at various structural levels. This study presents a statistical mechanical derivation of the law based on the analogy between the classical particles of a statistical mechanical organization and the distinct words of a textual organization. The derived model allows interpreting the model parameters in terms of physical concepts. We also propose that many organizations presenting the Menzerath–Altmann law behavior, whether linguistic or not, can be methodically examined by the transformed distribution model through the properly defined structure-dependent parameter and the energy associated states. (Abstract)

Eroglu, Sertac. Self-Organization of Genic and Intergenic Sequence Lengths in Genomes: Statistical Properties and Linguistic Coherence. Complexity. Early View June, 2014. In the 21st century and these 2010s, a grand convergence and unification of universe and human is well underway in our midst. In this paper, a Eskisehir Osmangazi University, Turkey, biophysicist, with a 2002 University of Illinois doctorate, provides one of the strongest correlations of the deep affinities between genomes and literature. Might one imagine a “languagome.” As intimated for decades, per the extended quotes, these primary evolutionary codings appear as earlier and later exemplars of a intrinsic natural program. Might we evoke a “naturome” and “cosmome.” What is again being found, as tradition understands, is a greater milieu suffused with text, poetry, legible, edifying script, that humankind might at last decipher and realize is genetic in kind.

In a genome, genes (coding constituents) are interrupted by intergenic regions (noncoding constituents). This study provides a general picture of the large-scale self-organization of coding, noncoding, and total constituent lengths in genomes. Ten model genomes were examined and strong correlations between the number of genomic constituents and the constituent lengths were observed. The analysis was carried out by adopting a linguistic distribution model and a structural analogy between linguistic and genomic constructs. The proposed linguistic-based statistical analysis may provide a fundamental basis for both understanding the linear structural formation of genomic constituents and developing insightful strategies to figure out the function of genic and intergenic regions in genomic sequences. (Abstract)

The proposed analogy between textual sequences and genomic sequences was as follows: Imagine that an organism’s genome serves as a look up table, or vocabulary list in which genomic constituents are considered as distinct words, and an organism’s entire DNA collection corresponds to a large text. One copy of each word (constituent) in this text is found in the look up table (genome) and each word is written using four-letter nucleotide alphabet. Next, suppose that all the constituents with their corresponding lengths in nucleotide count are listed in three categories; coding constituents, noncoding constituents, and total (coding + noncoding) constituents. Creating these categorized genomic constituent lists is analogous to listing a large text’s vocabulary inventory with corresponding lengths in letter count. In this analogy, the DNA to function pathway of an organism can be pictured as though the organism’s genome and the corresponding proteome are the vocabulary lists of two different texts written in two different languages — DNA language and proteinlanguage. The text written in DNA language is translated into the text written in protein language given by the coding, decoding, regulation, and gene expression rules dictated by RNA. The proper usage of the protein language’s distinct words (proteins) in the organismal text generates intended meaning (functions) in that organism. (3)

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