Auto-organization and Emergence of Shared Language Structure [chapter]

Edwin Hutchins, Brian Hazlehurst
2002 Simulating the Evolution of Language  
The principal goal of attempts to construct computational models of the emergence of language is to shed light on the kinds of processes that may have led to the development of such phenomena as shared lexicons and grammars in the history of the human species. Researchers who attempt to model the emergence of lexicons make a set of shared assumptions about the nature of the problem to be solved. First, there are constraints on what counts as a shared lexicon. A lexicon is a systematic set of
more » ... ociations (a mapping) between forms and meanings. Forms are patterns. Tokens of a form are physical structures that bear the pattern of a particular form. For example, words are forms in this sense. Each instance of a particular word is a token of that word because it bears the pattern (sequence of sounds or letters) of that word. Forms must be discriminable from one another. Meanings are generally taken to be mental structures which, on the one hand, shape agents' interactions with a world of objects and, on the other hand, also shape agents' interactions with forms. A lexicon is said to be shared when the members of a community adopt similar forms, meanings, and the mapping between these two elements. This is a requirement for the communication of meanings via forms. A shared lexicon is thus a systematic set of form-meaning mappings in which the forms are discriminable, the mappings are (roughly) one-to-one, and the set of associations between forms and meanings is shared by members of a community. The mappings are roughly one-to-one because synonyms (two or more forms for a single meaning) and homonyms (two or more meanings for a single form) are possible but do not dominate the mappings. The lexicons of natural languages can be described by these properties (among others). The emergence of a shared grammar presents a more complex problem. Grammar refers to properties of language involving sequences of lexical forms.
doi:10.1007/978-1-4471-0663-0_13 fatcat:6ixiw27zf5dbnfd2vtatedsr74