From Changes in the World to Changes in the Words: Lexical Adaptation

Jean-Philippe Magué (1, 2)

1 DDL - Dynamique Du Langage
2 ICAR - Interactions, Corpus, Apprentissages, Représentations

This paper deals with the evolution of the lexicon in a changing environment. We adopt Mufwene's (2001) metaphor of 'language as species' that explains evolution of languages as differential selection of features in languages' feature pools. We propose a multi-agent model and use it to explore the role of different constraints on the feature selection process. We show that constraints are indeed competing and that one of them is the major constraint in natural selection, viz., fitness to the environment.

Mots clés: language evolution; semantic change; modeling; multi-agent; conceptual space

Domaines: Linguistique

Jean-Philippe Magué. From Changes in the World to Changes in the Words: Lexical Adaptation. Nathalie Gontier, Jean Paul Van Bendegem and Diederik Aerts. Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture - A nonadaptationist systems theoretical approach, Springer, pp.169-194, 2006, Theory and Decision Library A, ⟨10.1007/1-4020-3395-8⟩. ⟨halshs-00410040⟩