ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Agent-based models for the emergence and evolution of grammar.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Neuroevolution insights into biological neural computation.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Article
- Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Potentially recursive structures emerge quickly when a new language community forms.Cognition · 2023Article
- Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The major synthetic evolutionary transitions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
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Abstract
Human languages are extraordinarily complex adaptive systems. They feature intricate hierarchical sound structures, are able to express elaborate meanings and use sophisticated syntactic and semantic structures to relate sound to meaning. What are the cognitive mechanisms that speakers and listeners need to create and sustain such a remarkable system? What is the collective evolutionary dynamics that allows a language to self-organize, become more complex and adapt to changing challenges in expressive power? This paper focuses on grammar. It presents a basic cycle observed in the historical language record, whereby meanings move from lexical to syntactic and then to a morphological mode of expression before returning to a lexical mode, and discusses how we can discover and validate mechanisms that can cause these shifts using agent-based models.This article is part of the themed issue 'The major synthetic evolutionary transitions'.
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