Edit Book :: Variation and Universals in Biolinguistics
2004
Toward a Theory of Language Growth
Variation and Universals in Biolinguistics, 2004
Phase Transitions in Language EvolutionPDF
Variation and Universals in Biolinguistics, 2004
Language is transmitted from one generation to the next via learning by individuals. By taking this point of view one is able to link the linguistic behavior of successive generations and therefore study how language evolves over generational time scales. We provide a brief ...MORE ⇓
Language is transmitted from one generation to the next via learning by individuals. By taking this point of view one is able to link the linguistic behavior of successive generations and therefore study how language evolves over generational time scales. We provide a brief overview of this approach to the study of language evolution, its formalization as a dynamical system, and the analogical connections to the methodological principles of evolutionary biology. We show how the interplay between learning and evolution can be quite subtle and how phase transitions arise in many such models of language evolution. Such phase transitions may provide a suitable theoretical construct with which explanations for rapid language change or evolution may be given. Some illustrative examples are provided.
The immune syntax: the evolution of the language virusPDF
Variation and Universals in Biolinguistics 14:341-377, 2004
Summary: Studies on the evolution of language have finally come of age, as the very useful recent work by Hauser et al.(2002) aptly shows. By separating a broad, ancient aspect of the faculty of language from a narrower, very recently evolved one, this piece creates a clean ...