Work

Ambiguity and the origins of syntax

Year: 2015

Type: article

Abstract: The paper argues that syntax is motivated by the need to avoid combinatorial search in parsing and semantic ambiguity in interpretation. It reports on a case study for the emergence and sharing of first-order phrase structures in a population of agents playing language games. First-order phrase structures combine words into phrases but do not yet generalise to hierarchical or recursive phrases. To study why human languages exhibit phrase structure, a series of strategies for creating and sharing linguistic conventions are examined, starting from a lexical strategy without syntax and then studying the use of groups, n-grams and patterns. Each time we show in which way a strategy improves on the computational complexity of the previous on.

Source: The Linguistic Review

DOI: 10.1515/tlr-2014-0021

Authors: Luc Steels, Emília Garcia Casademont

Institutions: Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats

OpenAlex ID: W2045873759

FWCI: 13.64

Cites: 10

Cited by: 24

Related to: 10