Kirby, S., Function, Selection and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999).  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....tuned to be better adapted to the language in the environment of the agents. This way the ontologies of the different agents become similar even though there is no telepathy and it is not innately given. 5 Experiments in the origins of grammar Several researchers, most notably Batali [2] Kirby [7] and Steels [16] 17] have been conducting experiments to explain how languages with the grammatical complexity of human natural languages may emerge. This requires a scale up along all dimensions (form, meaning, and form meaning association) and it is therefore not surprising that many open ....

Kirby, S.: Function, Selection and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals. Oxford University Press, Oxford. (1999)

....such a view di ers fundamentally from the simplistic some parts are innate, some parts learned explanations: cultural dynamics and evolutionary dynamics fundamentally interact. Applying this view to language, o ers a fresh perspective on some of the recurring problems in linguistics (see e.g. [13, 14]) It might very well be that children use grammatical rules in their speech without ever having encountered them. But such rules don t need to be hard wired in an infant s genome, if they are a consequence of the interaction between the infant s brain structures, its perceptual and motoric ....

....analysis, but counterintuitive in more complex computational models. A life models have e.g. shown contrary to conventional wisdom that language universals concerning vowel systems or syntactic parameters emerge from articulatory and acoustic constraints [6] and processing constraints [13] respectively. 7 3 A life the origins of language Recent work that studied the evolution of language in computational models has explored both the dynamics of language evolution and the selforganization of linguistic patterns, and has produced a wealth of new hypotheses and insights. Such ....

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Simon Kirby. Function, selection and innateness: The emergence of language universals. Oxford University Press, 1999.

.... researchers have become interested in building operational theories for how language and the conceptualisation of reality that underlies language can bootstrap itself, both in a developing single individual (ontogenesis) and in the human species (glossogenesis) Hurford, 1989) Steels, 1979b) (Kirby, 1999). An operational theory is one that is sufficiently worked out and formalised that it can be tested by computer simulations and robotic experiments. Whether such a theory is also valid for humans remains an open question, but at least the theory is operationally adequate and therefore suggests ....

Kirby, S. (1999). Function, Selection and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

....is present in its society, but this is not the case. First, since an agent uses its own intelligence to find the solution within some particular confines, it may enhance the solution it is being presented with. This is famously the case when young language learners regularize constructed languages [3, 33]. Secondly, a communicating culture may well contain more intelligence than any individual member of it, leading to the notion of cultural evolution and mimetics [20] Thus although the use of social learning in AI is only beginning to be explored [e.g. 53] we believe it will be an important ....

Simon Kirby. Function, Selection and Innateness: the Emergence of Language Universals. Oxford University Press, 1999.

....an account of language very similar to that taken here. The earliest post generative proposals that languages be viewed as adaptive systems of which I am aware are Lindblom (1986) and Hurford (1987) though this position is articulated far more clearly in more recent work such as Hurford (1999) Kirby (1999), Lindblom (1998) and Nettle (1999) Though the view that languages evolve has a generally bad press in linguistic theory, it is worth reconsidering as the neo Darwinian synthesis and subsequent analytic and algorithmic thinking about evolution and dynamical systems makes available a panoply of ....

Kirby, Simon (1999) Function, Selection and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

....to pidgin data, modelled as clauses with a verb and single word subjects and objects appearing in random orders, tend to acquire a grammar generating a SVO subset language with similar clauses. That is, they do not generalise the pidgin data to form a creole superset grammar but they 27 Kirby (1996, 1997) is one example of a detailed and carefully worked out account of linguistic change based on adaptation to language acquisition. 28 The estimate of 35 is based on census figures for 1890, 1900 and 1910 kindly supplied by Derek Bickerton. These are incomplete in some areas but indicate an ....

....have been proposed, both as accounts of the relative psychological complexity of sentence processing and of the relative prevalence of different construction types in attested languages. A metric of this type can be incorporated into an evolutionary linguistic model in a number of ways. Kirby (1996) argues, for example, that parsability equates to learnability, as triggers must be parsed before they can be used by a learner to acquire a grammar. By contrast, Hawkins (1994:83f) argues that parsability may influence generation so that more parsable variants will be used more frequently than ....

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Kirby, S. (1996) Function, Selection and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals, Doctoral Thesis, University of Edinburgh.

....inheritance. Several researchers have recently proposed that language can be treated as a dynamic or (complex) adaptive system in order to formally model aspects of language change (e.g. Niyogi and Berwick, 1997a,b) or account for typological, statistical and implicational universals (e.g. Kirby, 1996, 1997, 1998) In generative work on diachronic syntax, language change is primarily located in parameter resetting (reanalysis) during language acquisition (e.g. Lightfoot, 1979, 1992, 1997; Clark and Roberts, 1993; Kroch and Taylor, 1997) Differential learnability of grammatical systems, on the ....

....probability of successful interaction is partly a function of the working memory load created by the sentence type chosen. An alternative assumption is that maturational working memory limitations will decrease the chances of less parsable sentence types functioning as effective triggers (see e.g. Kirby, 1996, 1997, 1998 for a similar position) To simulate this scenario, the same set of runs was done with random selection for LAgts but with memory limitations during learning. The results show a very similar pattern to those reported above, though the selection effect is weaker and it is only when the ....

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Kirby, S. (1996) Function, Selection and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals, Doctoral Thesis, University of Edinburgh.

....evidence of enough constancy in the environment to allow genetic assimilation. However, once we view language itself as an adaptive system, this assumption, that universals are unambiguous evidence of genetic assimilation of linguistic knowledge into a LAD, is no longer valid. Hurford (1987) and Kirby (1996, 1997) argue that many linguistic universals, and especially typological, implicational or statistical universals, are the result of historical adaptations by languages to the capacities and limitations of language users. Drawing on Hawkins (1994) work on constituent order universals and his ....

....for. Similar results were obtained from all ten runs. These results show that linguistic selection can occur without any natural selection for LAgts whatsoever. The bias of the learning procedure which the LAgts use is enough to create a process of selection for the most learnable languages. Kirby (1996) explores in detail this form of linguistic selection as languages, or more accurately triggers, pass repeatedly through the bottleneck of language acquisition. Essentially, triggers compete for learners and those which are more able to pass through the filter of the learning procedure will set ....

Kirby, S. (1996) Function, Selection and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals, Doctoral Thesis, University of Edinburgh.

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Kirby, S., Function, Selection and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999).

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Kirby, S. (1999). Function, selection and innateness: The emergence of language universals. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

....of logically possible communication systems C. Linguistics is concerned with the set of possible human languages, LPH C. The two questions above are essentially about explaining the particular properties of the shape of LPH and showing how this set came to be from some prior (unknown) set L PH [28]. Before any of this is possible, there is also a nontrivial descriptive task of determining LPH . Thankfully, there is an enormous amount of excellent descriptive work in the linguistics literature that covers all aspects of language, from research into the syntax of individual languages both ....

Kirby, S. (1999). Function, Selection and Innateness: the Emergence of Language Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

....example, Ref. 25) or the role of horizontal transmission (see Ref. 2 for an ILM where transmission is purely horizontal) The ILM provides a powerful framework for investigating the cultural evolution of language. We have previously used the ILM to examine the emergence of word order universals [17], the regularity irregularity distinction [18] and recursive syntax [19] Here we will focus on the cultural evolution of compositionality, one of the characteristic structural properties of language. 4 Modelling the Evolution of Compositionality 4.1 Compositionality In a compositional ....

S. Kirby. Function, selection and innateness: the emergence of language universals. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999.

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S. Kirby, Function, Selection and Innateness: the Emergence of Language Universals, Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Kirby, S. (1999a). Function, Selection and Innateness: the Emergence of Language Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

.... Berwick 1995, Niyogi Berwick 1996a, Niyogi Berwick 1996b) provides the initial framework for the work done here, along with the work on triggers by Gibson Wexler (1994) which Niyogi Berwick s work in turn is based upon. The parsing complexity issues are looked at through the work of Kirby (1996) and the work of Hawkins (1994) on which some of Kirby s work is based. Clark Roberts s (1993) work is of interest because it also tries to incorporate ideas about acceptability within a given parameterisation along with issues of fitness and complexity. 2.1 Triggers In many respects the work ....

.... human parser s preference to gain as much constituency information in the shortest possible time is expressed as Early Immediate Constituent (EIC) recognition by Hawkins (1994) That is mother nodes are built above syntactic categories as soon as the node s presence is guaranteed by the input (Kirby 1996) (i.e. the mother node is constructed at the earliest opportunity, and the parser does not wait until all of the constituents below it have been fully constructed) Syntactic categories which allow the mother node to be built are referred to as Mother node constructing categories (MNCCs) Mother ....

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Kirby, S. (1996), Function, Selection and Innateness The Emergence of Language Universals, PhD thesis, Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh.

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Simon Kirby. Function, Selection and Innateness: the Emergence of Language Universals. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999a.

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Kirby, S. (1999). Function, Selection and Innateness: the Emergence of Language Universals. Oxford University Press.

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