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ARTIFICIALLY GROWING
A NUMERAL SYSTEM \Lambda
James R Hurford
Linguistics Department, University of Edinburgh

1 Introduction A special kind of language change, not centrally studied in historical linguistics, is language growth. Growth is change from a smaller system (or perhaps even from nothing) to a larger system. Gram­ matical growth can occur by addition of lexical items or, perhaps more interestingly, of rules. This paper describes attempts to simulate the growth of natural language numeral systems by computational techniques. Similar techniques could in principle by used to model the growth of other subsystems of grammar, and a long­term aim of this strand of research is to model the evolution of many of the organizational features of language. There are two salient factors in favour of using numeral systems as a test bed for this approach, and one salient factor against. ffl In favour: 1. Numeral systems are relatively simple, 2. Numeral systems are relatively self­contained. \Lambda Thanks to Simon Kirby and Matthew Aylett for helpful and stimulating discussion of this topic. None of it is their fault. 1  ffl Against: 1. Numeral systems are in various ways atypical of other language subsystems. These properties of numeral systems are known well enough to need no further elaboration here. 2 Artificial Life (`A­Life') Research The research paradigm inspiring this work is that of Artificial Life (`A­Life'). Two very readable popular introductions to this field are Levy (1992) and Lewin (1993), and there are now major collections stemming from workshops and conferences (Langton et al, (1991, 1994), Brooks and Maes (1994)). Although terminologically reminiscent of the discipline of Artificial Intelligence (AI), A­Life differs from it in several fundamental philosophical and methodological principles. Whereas AI at­ tempts to model developed or mature intelligence, the products of millennia of evolution, A­Life attempts to model the evolutionary processes ...

@incollection{hurford99artificiallyGrowing,
  author={J. Hurford},
  title={Artificially growing a numeral system},
  year={1999},
  pages={7-41},
  editor={Jadranka Gvozdanovic},
  publisher={},
  booktitle={Numeral Types and Changes Worldwide},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/hurford99artificiallyGrowing.html}
}

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