Gradual Modifications and Abrupt Replacements: Two Stochastic Lexical Ingredients of Language Evolution
The evolution of the vocabulary of a language is characterized by two different random processes: abrupt lexical replacements, when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept (which was at the basis of the Swadesh foundation of glottochronology in the 1950s), and gradual lexical modifications that progressively alter words over the So