Experiments in cultural language evolution
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Experiments in cultural language evolution
（Advances in interaction studies / series editors, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Angelo Cangelosi, 3）
John Benjamins, c2012
- : hb
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The fascinating question of the origins and evolution of language has been drawing a lot of attention recently, not only from linguists, but also from anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and brain scientists. This groundbreaking book explores the cultural side of language evolution. It proposes a new overarching framework based on linguistic selection and self-organization and explores it in depth through sophisticated computer simulations and robotic experiments. Each case study investigates how a particular type of language system can emerge in a population of language game playing agents and how it can continue to evolve in order to cope with changes in ecological conditions. Case studies cover on the one hand the emergence of concepts and words for proper names, color terms, names for bodily actions, spatial terms and multi-dimensional words. The second set of experiments focuses on the emergence of grammar, specifically case grammar for expressing argument structure, functional grammar for expressing different uses of spatial relations, internal agreement systems for marking constituent structure, morphological expression of aspect, and quantifiers expressed as articles. The book is ideally suited as study material for an advanced course on language evolution and it will be of interest to anyone who wonders how human languages may have originated.
Table of Contents
- 1. Foreword (by Steels, Luc)
- 2. Introduction. Self-organization and selection in cultural language evolution (by Steels, Luc)
- 3. Part I. Emergence of perceptually grounded vocabularies
- 4. The Grounded Naming Game (by Steels, Luc)
- 5. Language strategies for color (by Bleys, Joris)
- 6. Emergent mirror systems for body language (by Steels, Luc)
- 7. The co-evolution of basic spatial terms and categories (by Spranger, Michael)
- 8. Multi-dimensional meanings in lexicon formation (by Wellens, Pieter)
- 9. Part II. Emergence of grammatical systems
- 10. The evolution of case systems for marking event structure (by Trijp, Remi van)
- 11. Emergent functional grammar for space (by Spranger, Michael)
- 12. The emergence of internal agreement systems (by Beuls, Katrien)
- 13. A language strategy for aspect: Encoding Aktionsarten through morphology (by Gerasymova, Kateryna)
- 14. The emergence of quantifiers (by Pauw, Simon)
- 15. Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
