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Abstract

The majority of extant languages have one of three basic word orders: SVO, SOV or VSO. Various hypotheses have been put forward to explain aspects of this bias, including the existence of a universal grammar, learnability imposed by non-linguistic-specific cognitive constraints, and the descent of the extant languages from a common ancestral proto-language. Here, we adopt a multi-agent model for language emergence that simulates the coevolution of a lexicon and syntax from a holistic signaling system. The syntax evolves through a process of categorization; local syntactic rules are constructed that assign a relative order (e.g., S before V) to the elements of the two categories to which each rule applies. We demonstrate that local syntax encoding the relative position of S and O are the most stable, allowing the coexistence of the global word order pairs SOV/SVO and VOS/OVS. The structure of the semantic space that the language encodes further constrains the global syntax that is stable.

@inproceedings{minett06wordOrderBias,
  author={James W. Minett and Tao Gong and William S-Y. Wang},
  title={A language emergence model predicts word order bias},
  year={2006},
  pages={206-213},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Evolution of Language},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/minett06wordOrderBias.html}
}

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