Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Grammaticalization theory has become an influential theory within historical linguistics. Grammaticalization is the process whereby open-class lexical items develop over time into closed-class items with grammatical functions. It is said to be a uniform series of semantic changes involving metaphorical usage such as spatial terms acquire temporal meanings but not vice versa and bleaching. Grammaticalization often leads to morphologization, which is an independent marker of tense or where a number becomes an affix rather than remaining a free wordform, and may even ultimately fuse with the root of the lexeme to which it is attached. It is always possible for grammaticalization to stop short of morphologization that applies to most of the languages of East Asia. Even without any syntax there could be phonological processes operating between regularly contiguous words, and some of these processes could in due course become opaque. This would give rise to situations where the same meaning was expressed by two or more forms in different contexts that is, to instances of synonymy. Even without syntax, some items could be regularly juxtaposed to express a consistent conventionalized meaning. The capacity for allomorphy and morphophonological alternation could have arisen alongside syntax or even before it, but at any rate independently of it.

This article deals with the evolution of natural languages and examines artificial or imaginary languages that supply material for evolutionary- linguistic thought-experiments. The term creole has been used in a variety of ways. One usage links its definition to that of pidgin. A pidgin language has been defined as a rudimentary language even if to some degree it is an institutionalized form of language used between speakers whose mother tongues are mutually incomprehensible. A creole is then a pidgin that has acquired native speakers such as children surrounded by adults that belong to different speech communities and therefore talk to each other most of the time in pidgin. One of the group of researchers compared human cognitive and communicative capacities with those of animals. They attempted to identify what is contained in the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN), that is, those characteristics or capacities that are both peculiar to humans and peculiar to language. They suggest that the FLN may turn out to be limited to a sole characteristic, namely recursion. The vocabulary of one of the languages, monocategoric, contains two classes of items that include simple expressions, such as snake, you, John, Mary, and story, and operators. Operators may be one-place, two-place, three-place or in principle n-place for any n > 0. A well-formed expression in monocategoric is any simple expression or any complex expression formed from one or more other expressions (whether simple or complex) followed by an appropriate operator.

This book considers the evolution of the grammatical structure of words in the more general contexts of human evolution and the origins of language. The consensus in many fields is that language is well designed for its purpose, and became so either through natural selection or by virtue of non-biological constraints on how language must be structured. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy argues that in certain crucial respects language is not optimally designed. This can be seen, he suggests, in the existence of not one but two kinds of grammatical organization - syntax and morphology - and in the morphological and morpho-phonological complexity which leads to numerous departures from the one-form-one-meaning principle.

Table of Contents
1. Design in Language and Design in Biology
2. Why There is Morphology: Traditional Accounts
3. A Cognitive-Articulatory Dilemma
4. Modes of Synonymy Avoidance
5. The Ancestors of Affixes
6. The Ancestors of Stem Alternants
7. Derivation, Compounding, and Lexical Storage
8. Morphological homonymy and Morphological Meanings
9. Conclusions

Three factors contribute to the evolutionary development of an organism: (i) historical accident (the genetic raw material available for natural selection to work on); (ii) adaptation through natural selection; (iii) nonbiological (especially physical) constraints. The same factors apply in principle to characteristics of an organism, such as the biological basis of the capacity for language in humans. From the point of view of these three factors, the author discusses recent contributions from linguists to language evolution research, including the contributions in this volume. He emphasises the importance of language evolution research for the development of linguistic theory, and the consequent need for more linguists to get involved in language evolution research.