Simon Kirby - 1998 - Fitness and the selective adaptation of language

Kirby, S. (1998) Fitness and the selective adaptation of language. In Hurford, J. R. and Studdert-Kennedy, M. and Knight C., editors, Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases, pages 359--383. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Paper at a Glance

Fitness and the selective adaptation of language
Simon Kirby
September 4, 1996
1 Introduction The question that is at the centre of this paper is how can we go about explaining the ob served constraints on variation across languages --- in other words, language universals. 1 What makes many of these constraints interesting is that they appear to have `evolved' in that they are adaptive; a point that is made repeatedly in the functionalist literature. What I will argue here, however, is that we should not rush into a biological evolutionary expla nation for such universals. Where language is concerned, adaptation may be the result of several different interacting dynamic systems. The order of presentation will be as follows. The next section is an introduction to what it means for something to be adaptive. The following two sections will illustrate this with two processing and typological asymmetries connected with word order and relative clauses. A potential biological explanation will be put forward and rejected in favour of a historical explanation in the next two sections. This alternative explanation will be tested using a computational model of interacting agents using language over several generations. Finally, the implications of this approach for the phylogenetic evolution of language will be sketched in the final section. The novel contribution of this paper is the suggestion that languages evolve historically to be optimal communicative systems, and that the innately specified human language learning mechanisms have evolved in order to learn these systems more efficiently. In other words, human language has not evolved (in the phylogenetic timescale) directly in response to com municative needs, even though the crosslinguistic evidence is that language is well adapted for communication. 2 The fitness of universals I have suggested that many of the constraints on cross linguistic variation found in the ty pological literature (see e.g. Greenberg 1963; ...

BibTex

@incollection{kirby98fitnessAnd,
  author={S. Kirby},
  title={Fitness and the selective adaptation of language},
  year={1998},
  pages={359-383},
  address={Cambridge},
  editor={Hurford, J. R. and Studdert-Kennedy, M. and Knight C.},
  publisher={Cambridge University Press},
  booktitle={Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/kirby98fitnessAnd.html},
  keywords={language evolution, universals, natural selection, formalism, functionalism}
}

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