[PDF] Language Games And Evolution eBook

Author : Morten H. Christiansen
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 20,19 MB
Release : 2003-07-24
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0191581666

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What is it that makes us human? This is one of the most challenging and important questions we face. Our species' defining characteristic is language - we appear to be unique in the natural world in having such an incredibly open-ended system for putting thoughts into words. If we are to truly understand ourselves as a species we must understand the origins of this strange and unique ability. To do so, we need to answer some of the most intriguing questions in contemporary scientific research: Where did language come from? How did it evolve? Why are we unique in possessing it? This book, for the first time, brings together the leading thinkers who are trying to unlock the puzzle of language evolution. Here we see the latest ideas and theories from fields as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology. In a series of seventeen well-written and accessible chapters we get an unrivalled view of the state of the art in this exciting area. Current controversies are revealed and new perspectives uncovered, in a clear and readable guide to the latest theories. This collection marks a major step forward in our quest to understand the origins and evolution of human language. In doing so it sheds new light on the process of evolution, the workings of the brain, the structure of language, and - most importantly - what it means to be human. Language Evolution is essential reading for researchers and students working in the areas covered, and has been used as a textbook for courses in the field. It will also attract the general reader who wants to know more about this fascinating subject.

Author : Anton Benz
Publisher : Springer
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 32,56 MB
Release : 2011-03-05
Category : Computers
ISBN : 364218006X

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Recent years witnessed an increased interest in formal pragmatics and especially the establishment of game theory as a new research methodology for the study of language use. Game and Decision Theory (GDT) are natural candidates if we look for a theoretical foundation of linguistic pragmatics. Over the last decade, a firm research community has emerged with a strong interdisciplinary character, where economists, philosophers, and social scientists meet with linguists. Within this field of research, three major currents can be distinguished: one is closely related to the Gricean paradigm and aims at a precise foundation of pragmatic reasoning, the second originates in the economic literature and is concerned with the role of game theory in the context of language use, and the third aims at language evolution seen either from a biological or from a cultural perspective. Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this volume is based on a selection of papers of two international conferences, one organised at ESSLLI in 2007 on language, games, and evolution, and the other organised at the ZAS in Berlin on games and decisions in pragmatics in 2008. This volume is rounded off by additional invited papers and now contains eight articles of leading researchers in the field which together provide a state-of-the-art survey of current research on language evolution and game theoretic approaches to pragmatics.

Author : W. Tecumseh Fitch
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 625 pages
File Size : 37,77 MB
Release : 2010-04-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 113948706X

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Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering. Tecumseh Fitch cuts through this vast literature, bringing together its most important insights to explore one of the biggest unsolved puzzles of human history.

Author : Anton Benz
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 35,18 MB
Release : 2011-03-14
Category : Computers
ISBN : 3642180051

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Recent years witnessed an increased interest in formal pragmatics and especially the establishment of game theory as a new research methodology for the study of language use. Game and Decision Theory (GDT) are natural candidates if we look for a theoretical foundation of linguistic pragmatics. Over the last decade, a firm research community has emerged with a strong interdisciplinary character, where economists, philosophers, and social scientists meet with linguists. Within this field of research, three major currents can be distinguished: one is closely related to the Gricean paradigm and aims at a precise foundation of pragmatic reasoning, the second originates in the economic literature and is concerned with the role of game theory in the context of language use, and the third aims at language evolution seen either from a biological or from a cultural perspective. Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this volume is based on a selection of papers of two international conferences, one organised at ESSLLI in 2007 on language, games, and evolution, and the other organised at the ZAS in Berlin on games and decisions in pragmatics in 2008. This volume is rounded off by additional invited papers and now contains eight articles of leading researchers in the field which together provide a state-of-the-art survey of current research on language evolution and game theoretic approaches to pragmatics.

Author : William H. Sandholm
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 618 pages
File Size : 44,59 MB
Release : 2010-12-17
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0262195879

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Evolutionary game theory studies the behaviour of large populations of strategically interacting agents & is used by economists to predict in settings where traditional assumptions about the rationality of agents & knowledge may be inapplicable.

Author : Robert C. Berwick
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 27,45 MB
Release : 2017-05-12
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0262533499

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Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans' remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it. “A loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.” —New York Review of Books We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.

Author : Drew Fudenberg
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 36,32 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780262061940

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This work explains that equilibrium is the long-run outcome of a process in which non-fully rational players search for optimality over time. The models they e×plore provide a foundation for equilibrium theory and suggest ways for economists to evaluate and modify traditional equilibrium concepts.

Author : John Maynard Smith
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 31,68 MB
Release : 1982-10-21
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780521288842

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This 1982 book is an account of an alternative way of thinking about evolution and the theory of games.

Author : Morten H. Christiansen
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 31,88 MB
Release : 2016-03-18
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 026203431X

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A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences. Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.

Author : Morten H. Christiansen
Publisher : Hachette UK
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 45,88 MB
Release : 2022-02-22
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1541674979

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Forget the language instinct—this is the story of how we make up language as we go Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity—and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the only requirement being a desire to understand and be understood. From this new vantage point, Christiansen and Chater find compelling solutions to major mysteries like the origins of languages and how language learning is possible, and to long-running debates such as whether having two words for “blue” changes what we see. In the end, they show that the only real constraint on communication is our imagination.