Social Network Limits Language Complexity
Authored by Matthew Lou-Magnuson, Luca Onnis
Date Published: 2018
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12683
Sponsors:
Singapore Ministry of Education
Platforms:
Julia
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Model Code URLs:
https://gitlab.com/skagit/SNLLC
Abstract
Natural languages vary widely in the degree to which they make use of
nested compositional structure in their grammars. It has long been noted
by linguists that the languages historically spoken in small communities
develop much deeper levels of compositional embedding than those spoken
by larger groups. Recently, this observation has been confirmed by a
robust statistical analysis of the World Atlas of Language Structures.
In order to examine this connection mechanistically, we propose an
agent-based model that accounts for key cultural evolutionary features
of language transfer and language change. We identify transitivity as a
physical parameter of social networks critical for the evolution of
compositional structure and the hierarchical patterning of scale-free
distributions as inhibitory.
Tags
Agent-based model
Evolution
emergence
language evolution
Social Network
population
language change
Grammaticalization
Language complexity