Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

This article presents an analysis of interactions in the usage, structure, cognition, coadaptation of conversational partners, and emergence of linguistic constructions. It focuses on second language development of English verb-argument constructions (VACs: VL, verb locative; VOL, verb object locative; VOO, ditransitive) with particular reference to the following: (a) Construction learning as concept learning following the general cognitive and associative processes of the induction of categories from experience of exemplars in usage obtained through coadapted micro-discursive interaction with conversation partners; (b) the empirical analysis of usage by means of corpus linguistic descriptions of native and nonnative speech and of longitudinal emergence in the interlanguage of second language learners; (c) the effects of the frequency and Zipfian type/token frequency distribution of exemplars within the Verb and other islands of the construction archipelago (e.g., [Subj V Obj Oblpath/loc]), by their prototypicality, their generic coverage, and their contingency of form-meaning-use mapping, and (d) computational (emergent connectionist) models of these various factors as they play out in the emergence of constructions as generalized linguistic schema.

Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of human interaction along with domain-general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language. Recent research in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use strongly affect how language is acquired, is used, and changes. These processes are not independent of one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system (CAS). Language as a CAS involves the following key features: The system consists of multiple agents (the speakers in the speech community) interacting with one another. The system is adaptive; that is, speakers' behavior is based on their past interactions, and current and past interactions together feed forward into future behavior. A speaker's behavior is the consequence of competing factors ranging from perceptual constraints to social motivations. The structures of language emerge from interrelated patterns of experience, social interaction, and cognitive mechanisms. The CAS approach reveals commonalities in many areas of language research, including first and second language acquisition, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, language evolution, and computational modeling.