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Languages and Linguistics
Historical Linguistics

The Learning and Emergence of Mildly Context Sensitive Languages

Profile image of Edward StablerEdward Stabler

2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39432-7_56
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13 pages

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Abstract

This paper describes a framework for studies of the adaptive acquisition and evolution of language, with the following components: language learning begins by associating words with cognitively salient representations ("grounding"); the sentences of each language are determined by properties of lexical items, and so only these need to be transmitted by learning; the learnable languages allow multiple agreements, multiple crossing agreements, and reduplication, as mildly context sensitive and human languages do; infinitely many different languages are learnable; many of the learnable languages include infinitely many sentences; in each language, inferential processes can be defined over succinct representations of the derivations themselves; the languages can be extended by innovative responses to communicative demands. Preliminary analytic results and a robotic implementation are described.

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