Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

We present evidence that, for English, ambiguity is an active factor in the choice of relativization strategy and that, in speech, prosody plays a role in resolution of ambiguity over the internal role of the relativized constituent. The evidence is based on (semi-)automatic analysis and comparison of automatically-parsed written and spoken portions of the British National Corpus (BNC, Leech, 1992) and of the prosodically-transcribed Spoken English Corpus (SEC, Taylor and Knowles, 1988). The results are evaluated with respect to a model of parsing complexity and syntactic disambiguation (Briscoe 1987, 2000) building on Combinatory Categorial Grammar (Steedman, 2000) and this model is in turn motivated by an evolutionary account of linguistic coevolutionary adaptation of the syntactic and phonological prosodic systems to a solution which minimizes processing cost. To our knowledge this is the first work which investigates linguistic adaptations aimed at reducing ambiguity while making testable predictions about linguistic organization.