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Edinburgh Occasional Papers in Linguistics April 3, 1998
Language evolution without natural selection: From
vocabulary to syntax in a population of learners
Simon Kirby
simon@ling.ed.ac.uk

1 Introduction How can we explain the origins of our uniquely human compositional system of communi­ cation? Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in this and other questions surround­ ing the evolution of human language and the origins of syntax in particular (Bickerton 1990; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Newmeyer 1991; Hurford et al. 1998). 1 Much of this is due to an explicit attempt to relate models of our innate linguistic endowment with neo­Darwinian evolutionary theory. These are essentially functional stories, arguing that the central fea­ tures of human language are genetically encoded and have emerged over evolutionary time in response to natural selection pressures. In this paper I put forward a new approach to understanding the origins of some of the key ingredients in a syntactic system. I show using a computational model that composi­ tional syntax is an inevitable outcome of the dynamics of observationally learned communi­ cation systems. In the model described, a population of simple learning mechanisms train each other to produce utterances. The ''language'' in the population develops from a sim­ ple idiosyncratic vocabulary with limited expressive power and little coordination among members of the population, to one with nouns and verbs, word order expressing meaning distinctions, full compositionality, all the meaning space covered and complete coordination. All this happens without any selection of learners --- indeed without any biological change --- or any notion of function being built into the system. This approach does not deny the possibility that much of our linguistic ability is geneti­ cally coded and may be explained in terms of natural selection, but it does highlight the fact that biological evolution is by no means the only powerful adaptive ...

@techreport{kirby98languageEvolution,
  author={S. Kirby},
  title={Language evolution without natural selection: From vocabulary to syntax in a population of learners},
  year={1998},
  institution={Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, University of Edinburgh},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/kirby98languageEvolution.html},
  keywords={language evolution, computer simulation}
}

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