Modelling the role of pragmatic plasticity in the evolution of linguistic communication
For a long time, human language has been assumed to be genetically determined and therefore the product of biological evolution. It is only within the last decade that researchers have begun to investigate more closely the domaingeneral cognitive mechanisms of cultural evolution as an alternative explanation for the origins of language. Most of this more recent work focuses on the role of imperfect cultural transmission and abstracts away from the mechanisms of communication. Specifically, models developed to study the cultural evolution of languageâboth theoretical and computationalâoften tacitly assume that linguistic signals fully specify the meaning they communicate. They imply that ignoring the fact that this is not the case in actual language use is a justified idealisation which can be made without significant consequences. In this thesis, I show that by making this idealisation, we miss out on the extensive explanatory potential of an empirically attested property of language: its pragmatic plasticity. The meaning that a signal comes to communicate in a specific context usually differs to a certain degree from its conventional meaning. This thesis (i) introduces a model of the cultural evolution
Hoefler, Stefan H.
Linguistics ; language evolution
Modelling the role of pragmatic plasticity in the evolution of linguistic communication. For a long time, human language has been assumed to be genetically determined and therefore the product of biological evolution. It is only within the last decade that researchers have begun to investigate more closely the domaingeneral cognitive mechanisms of cultural evolution as an alternative explanation for the origins of language. Most of this more recent work focuses on the role of imperfect cultural transmission and abstracts away from the mechanisms of communication. Specifically, models developed to study the cultural evolution of languageâboth theoretical and computationalâoften tacitly assume that linguistic signals fully specify the meaning they communicate. They imply that ignoring the fact that this is not the case in actual language use is a justified idealisation which can be made without significant consequences. In this thesis, I show that by making this idealisation, we miss out on the extensive explanatory potential of an empirically attested property of language: its pragmatic plasticity. The meaning that a signal comes to communicate in a specific context usually differs to a certain degree from its conventional meaning. This thesis (i) introduces a model of the cultural evolution
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