Ambiguity and the origins of syntax
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20344301 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Luc Steels (0000-0001-9134-3663, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, corresponding author), Emília Garcia Casademont (Institut de Biologia Evolutiva) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Linguistic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0167-6318 • E-ISSN: 1613-3676 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/tlr-2014-0021 |
| OpenAlex | W2045873759 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 1 |
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
Ambiguity · Generative grammar · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Parsing · Phrase · Phrase structure rules · Programming language · Syntactic structure · Syntax · Computer Science · Language and cultural evolution · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence
| Citations per year | 0.1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2016 - 2016 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |