Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

The theme of language as play suggests inquiries into non-cognitive uses of language such as that found in riddles, jingles, or tongue twisters—and beyond this into the poetic and ritual function of language, as well as into parallels between language and ritual, language and ...

Language is the main distinctive feature of our species. Why do we feel the urge to communicate with our fellows, and why is this form of communication, characterised by relevance, unique in animal kingdom ? In this chapter, we will first stress this specificity of human communication. In a second part, using computer evolutionary simulations, we will dismiss the usual claim that human communication is a specific form of reciprocal cooperation. A Darwinian account of language requires that we find a selective advantage in the communication act. We will propose, in the third part of this chapter, that such an advantage can be found if we consider language activity in the broader frame of human social organisation. In the continuation of the 'chimpanzee politics' studied by de Waal (1982), the ability to form large coalitions must have been an essential feature of hominid societies (Dunbar 1996). We will suggest that relevant speech originated in this context, as a way for individuals to select each other to form alliances.

How can we explain the origins of our uniquely human compositional system of communication? Much of the recent work tackling this problem (e.g Bickerton 1990; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Newmeyer 1991; Hurford et al. 1998) explicitly attempts to relate models of our innate linguistic endowment with neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. These are essentially functional stories, arguing that the central features of human language are genetically encoded and have emerged over evolutionary time in response to natural selection pressures.

In this paper I put forward a new approach to understanding the origins of some of the key ingredients in a syntactic system. I show, using a computational model, that compositional syntax is an inevitable outcome of the dynamics of observationally learned communication systems. In a simulated population of individuals, language develops from a simple idiosyncratic vocabulary with little expressive power, to a compositional system with high expressivity, nouns and verbs, and word order expressing meaning distinctions. This happens without natural selection of learners --- indeed, without any biological change at all --- or any notion of function being built into the system.

This approach does not deny the possibility that much of our linguistic ability may be explained in terms of natural selection, but it does highlight the fact that biological evolution is by no means the only powerful adaptive system at work in the origins of human language.