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
4 - Linguistic structure and the evolution of words
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
This paper describes a precise sense in which language change can be regarded as a form of evolution – not of the language itself, but of the individual words which constitute the language. Many prominent features of language can be understood as the result of this evolution. In a unification-based theory of language, each word sense is represented in the brain by a re-entrant feature structure, which embodies the syntax, semantics and phonology of the word. When understanding or generating a sentence, we unify together the feature structures of the words in the sentence to form a derivation structure. The feature structure for any word can then be learnt by feature structure generalization, which complements unification to replicate the word feature structure precisely in a new mind. By this replication, word feature structures propagate precisely from one generation to the next, just as DNA propagates precisely in cell replication. The precision and transparency of DNA replication underlies the structure and diversity of life. Similarly, the precise and transparent replication of word memes underlies the structure and diversity of language. As word feature structures propagate from generation to generation, they undergo slow changes from selection pressures which cause many types of language regularities. In this analogy, each language is an ecology and each word is one species in the ecology. In language as in nature, different species exert selection pressures on one another.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Linguistic Evolution through Language Acquisition , pp. 75 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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