Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Like an increasing number of linguists and other scholars especially interested in the evolution and/or the ontogenetic development of language, the author claims that languages are complex adaptive systems (CAS). These have been characterized as reflecting complex dynamics of interactive agents, experiencing constant instability, and in search for equilibrium in response to changes in the ecologies of their usage. Putatively, thanks to self-organization, transitional moments of apparent stability obtain during which patterns and systems emerge, and evolutions obtain from the alternations of periods of instability and stability in seemingly unpredictable ways. The author addresses the issues of the many interpretations of ‘complexity’ applying to language(s), of the description of the interactive agents that produce the above characteristics, of the emergence of complexity in language(s) from the point of view of language evolution, of the kind(s) of evidence that support(s) the various interpretations of ‘complexity’ that are conceivable, of the way in which complexity in language compares with complexity in other non-linguistic phenomena, and of the causes of the “chaos” which prompts languages to reorganize themselves into new systems.

Studies of language change have begun to contribute to answering several pressing questions in cognitive sciences, including the origins of human language capacity, the social construction of cognition and the mechanisms underlying culture change in general. Here, we describe recent advances within a new emerging framework for the study of language change, one that models such change as an evolutionary process among competing linguistic variants. We argue that a crucial and unifying element of this framework is the use of probabilistic, data-driven models both to infer change and to compare competing claims about social and cognitive influences on language change.

While Noah Webster may have produced the earliest compendium on American English, the divergence from British English dates from much earlier. Long before the publication of Webster's Dictionary in 1806, pronunciation in America and in Britain had begun to differ (1, 2). The Dictionary thus does not mark a fixed point when all Americans shifted abruptly from British to American English. The speciation, rather, was gradual, because individual speakers change gradually, by increments, in their lifetimes; individual changes also spread gradually from speaker to speaker.

Examines the processes by which languages change, from the macroecological perspective of competition and natural selection. This work looks at such themes as: natural selection in language; the actuation question and the invisible hand that drives evolution; multilingualism and language contact; and, language birth and language death.

Since the late 1980s, language endangerment and death have been discussed as if the phenomena had no connection at all with language birth. More recently the phenomena have been associated almost exclusively with the intense and pervasive economic globalization of same period, a process that some authors have reduced too easily to the McDonaldization phenomenon. Moreover, the relation of globalization to different forms of colonization has been poorly articulated. As a matter of fact, little of the longer history of population movements and contacts since the dawn of agriculture has been invoked in the literature on language endangerment to give some broader perspective on the mechanisms of language birth and death and on the ecological factors that bear on how they proceed. This review aims to remedy these shortcomings in our scholarship.

The primary thesis of this paper is that selection plays a role in language evolution. Underlying this position is the assumption that a language is a Lamarckian species, a construct extrapolated from idiolects spoken by individuals who acknowledge using the same verbal code to communicate with each other. There is no perfect replication in any case of language ``acquisition'', which is actually a recreation process in which the learner makes a system out of features selected from utterances of different individuals with whom he/she has interacted. In a way similar to gene recombination in biology, each learner gradually and selectively reintegrates into new system features which are often modified in the process. At the population level, the congruence of some divergent idiolectal selections is often strong enough for a language to evolve into a new communal system. A fundamental question for my hypothesis is: What principles regulate selection I also assume hybridism in language ``transmission'', which is polyploidic, as features of every idiolect originate not only in various competing idiolects, but possibly also in different dialects or languages in contact. The question about feature selection remains the same.