Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Learned systems of arbitrary reference: The foundation of human linguistic uniqueness
- 3 Bootstrapping grounded word semantics
- 4 Linguistic structure and the evolution of words
- 5 The negotiation and acquisition of recursive grammars as a result of competition among exemplars
- 6 Learning, bottlenecks and the evolution of recursive syntax
- 7 Theories of cultural evolution and their application to language change
- 8 The learning guided evolution of natural language
- 9 Grammatical acquisition and linguistic selection
- 10 Expression/induction models of language evolution: dimensions and issues
- Index
6 - Learning, bottlenecks and the evolution of recursive syntax
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Learned systems of arbitrary reference: The foundation of human linguistic uniqueness
- 3 Bootstrapping grounded word semantics
- 4 Linguistic structure and the evolution of words
- 5 The negotiation and acquisition of recursive grammars as a result of competition among exemplars
- 6 Learning, bottlenecks and the evolution of recursive syntax
- 7 Theories of cultural evolution and their application to language change
- 8 The learning guided evolution of natural language
- 9 Grammatical acquisition and linguistic selection
- 10 Expression/induction models of language evolution: dimensions and issues
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Human language is a unique natural communication system for two reasons. Firstly, the mapping from meanings to signals in language has structural properties that are not found in any other animal's communication systems. In particular, syntax gives us the ability to produce an infinite range of expressions through the dual tools of compositionality and recursion. Compositionality is defined here as the property whereby an expression's meaning is a function of the meanings of parts of that expression and the way they are put together. Recursion is a property of languages with finite lexica and rule-sets in which some constituent of an expression can contain a constituent of the same category. Together with recursion, compositionality is the reason that this infinite set of expressions can be used to express different meanings.
Secondly, at least some of the content of this mapping is learned by children through observation of others' use of language. This seems not to be true of most, maybe all, of animal communication (see review in Oliphant, this volume). In this chapter I formally investigate the interaction of these two unique properties of human language: the way it is learned and its syntactic structure.
Evolution without natural selection
Evolutionary linguistics is currently a growing field of research tackling the origins of human language (Bickerton, 1990; Pinker & Bloom, 1990; Newmeyer, 1991; Hurford et al., 1998). Of particular interest to many researchers is the origins of syntactic structure.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Linguistic Evolution through Language Acquisition , pp. 173 - 204Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
- 63
- Cited by