Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Complex adaptive systems consist of a large number of interacting agents. Agents are goal-directed, cognitive individuals capable of perception, information processing and action. However, agents are intrinsically “bounded” in their rational understanding of the system they belong to, and its global organization tends to emerge from local interactions, resulting in a coordination of the agents and their actions. This coordination minimizes conflict or friction, while facilitating cooperation or synergy. The basic mechanism is the reinforcement of synergetic interactions and the suppression of conflictual ones. As a result, the system as a whole starts to behave like an integrated cognitive “superagent”. The author presents several examples of this process of spontaneous coordination that leads to distributed cognition, including the emergence of a shared vocabulary, the development of standard referential expressions, the evolution of transmitted ideas (memes) towards more stereotypical forms, and the aggregation of diverse experiences into collective decisions, in which the system as a whole is more intelligent than its individual components. These phenomena have been investigated by means of multi-agent computer simulations and social psychological experiments.

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.