Simon Kirby, Jim Hurford - 1997 - Learning, culture and evolution in the origin of linguistic constraints

Kirby, S. and Hurford, J. (1997) Learning, culture and evolution in the origin of linguistic constraints. In P. Husbands and I. Harvey, editors, ECAL97, pages 493--502. MIT Press.

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Paper at a Glance

Learning, Culture and Evolution in the Origin of Linguistic Constraints
Simon Kirby & James Hurford
Department of Linguistics
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh
Scotland
simon@ling.ed.ac.uk
1 Introduction One of the interesting challenges facing linguistics today is the explanation of the observed constraints on cross linguistic variation. 1 Traditional linguistic typology (e.g. [14, 9, 16, 10]) as well as generative theories of language acquisition (e.g. [5, 15]) highlight the fact that the lan guages of the world appear to fall into a narrowly defined region of the space of logically possible languages. A language typology is a categorisation of some interesting subset of the dimensions along which languages can vary, and language universals are logical statements that re late orthogonal dimensions of such a typology. Although there is a lively debate about what these universal con straints on variation actually are, and what constitutes evidence for them [31], the greatest area of disagreement is clearly how to go about explaining the origins of these constraints [28]. The questions that this conflict of expla nation gives rise to go to the heart of modern linguistics. In this paper we will be examining one aspect of lin guistic constraints: the appearance of design. Many at tempts at explaining universals have pointed out their fit to the functions of language. Hawkins [17, 18] for ex ample, attempts to explain a whole range of universals relating to word order in terms of the processing load on the human parser. Although this kind of research (known as functionalist explanations in linguistics) is important, we believe they leave the real problem unanswered -- how exactly do functional pressures end up being expressed as crosslinguistic constraints on variation? Another in fluential strand of research (known as formal or innatist linguistics) treats language universals as the direct con sequence of the structure of a domain specific language ...

BibTex

@inproceedings{kirby97learningCulture,
  author={S. Kirby and J. Hurford},
  title={Learning, culture and evolution in the origin of linguistic constraints},
  year={1997},
  pages={493-502},
  editor={P. Husbands and I. Harvey},
  publisher={MIT Press},
  booktitle={ECAL97},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/kirby97learningCulture.html},
  keywords={artificial life, language evolution, culture, language acquisition}
}

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