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Paper at a Glance

Spontaneous Lexicon Change
Luc Steels (1,2) and Fr'ed'eric Kaplan (1,3)
(1) Sony CSL Paris ­ 6 Rue Amyot, 75005 Paris
(2) VUB AI Lab ­ Brussels
(3) LIP6 ­ 4, place Jussieu 75232 Paris cedex 05

Abstract The paper argues that language change can be explained through the stochasticity observed in real­world natural language use. This the­ sis is demonstrated by modeling language use through language games played in an evolv­ ing population of agents. We show that the artificial languages which the agents sponta­ neously develop based on self­organisation, do not evolve even if the population is changing. Then we introduce stochasticity in language use and show that this leads to a constant innova­ tion (new forms and new form­meaning associ­ ations) and a maintenance of variation in the population, if the agents are tolerant to varia­ tion. Some of these variations overtake existing linguistic conventions, particularly in changing populations, thus explaining lexicon change.
1 Introduction Natural language evolution takes place at all levels of language (McMahon, 1994). This is partly due to external factors such as language contact between different populations or the need to express new meanings or support new modes of interaction with language. But it is well­established that language also changes spontaneously based on an internal dynam­ ics (Labov, 1994). For example, many sound changes, like from /b/ to /p/, /d/ to /t/, and /g/ to /k/, which took place in the evolution from proto­Indo­European to Modern Germanic languages, do not have an external motivation. Neither do many shifts in the expression of meanings. For example, the expression of fu­ ture tense in English has shifted from ''shall'' to ''will'', even though ''shall'' was perfectly suited and ''will'' meant something else (namely ''wanting to''). Similarly, restructuring of the grammar occurs without any apparent reason. For example, in Modern English the auxiliaries come before the main verb, whereas ...

@inproceedings{steels98spontaneousLexicon,
  author={L. Steels and F. Kaplan},
  title={Spontaneous Lexicon Change},
  year={1998},
  pages={1243-1249},
  address={Montreal},
  publisher={ACL},
  booktitle={COLING-ACL98},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/steels98spontaneousLexicon.html},
  keywords={lexicon change, self-organization, language games, evolutionary linguistics, agents, simulation}
}

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