Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Explaining the diversity of languages across the world is one of the central aims of typological, historical, and evolutionary linguistics. We consider the effect of language contact-the number of non-native speakers a language has-on the way languages change and evolve. By analysing hundreds of languages within and across language families, regions, and text types, we show that languages with greater levels of contact typically employ fewer word forms to encode the same information content (a property we refer to as lexical diversity). Based on three types of statistical analyses, we demonstrate that this variance can in part be explained by the impact of non-native speakers on information encoding strategies. Finally, we argue that languages are information encoding systems shaped by the varying needs of their speakers. Language evolution and change should be modeled as the co-evolution of multiple intertwined adaptive systems: On one hand, the structure of human societies and human learning capabilities, and on the other, the structure of language.

Understanding language evolution in terms of cultural transmission across generations of language users raises the possibility that some of the processes that have shaped language evolution can also be observed in historical language change. In this paper, we explore how constraints on production may affect the cultural evolution of language by analyzing the emergence of the Romance languages from Latin. Specifically, we focus on the change from Latin's flexible but OV (Object-Verb) dominant word order with complex case marking to fixed SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) word order with little or no noun inflections in Romance Languages. We suggest that constraints on second language learners' ability to produce sentences may help explain this historical change. We conclude that historical data on linguistic change can provide a useful source of information relevant to investigating the cognitive constraints that affect the cultural evolution of language.