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Introduction

Human language is a unique natural communication system for two rea- sons. Firstly, the mapping from meanings to signals in language has structural properties that are not found in any other animal's communi- cation systems. In particular, syntax gives us the ability to produce an in nite range of expressions through the dual tools of compositionality and recursion. Compositionality is defined here as the property whereby an expression's meaning is a function of the meanings of parts of that expression and the way they are put together. Recursion is a property of languages with finite lexica and rule-sets in which some constituent of an expression can contain a constituent of the same category. Together with recursion, compositionality is the reason that this in finite set of expressions can be used to express different meanings.

Secondly, at least some of the content of this mapping is learned by children through observation of others' use of language. This seems not to be true of most, maybe all, of animal communication (see review in Oliphant, this volume). In this chapter I formally investigate the interaction of these two unique properties of human language: the way it is learned and its syntactic structure.

@incollection{kirby02learningBottlenecks,
  author={S. Kirby},
  title={Learning, Bottlenecks and the Evolution of Recursive Syntax},
  year={2002},
  chapter={6},
  editor={Ted Briscoe},
  publisher={Cambridge University Press},
  booktitle={Linguistic Evolution through Language Acquisition: Formal and Computational Models},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/kirby02learningBottlenecks.html}
}

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