Self-Assessing Agents for Explaining Language Change: A Case Study in German

Language change is increasingly recognized as one of the most crucial sources of evidence for understanding human cognition. Unfortunately, despite sophisticated methods for documenting which changes have taken place, the question of why languages evolve over time remains open for speculation. This paper presents a novel research method that addresses this issue by combining agent-based experiments with deep language processing, and demonstrates the approach through a case study on German definite articles. More specifically, two populations of autonomous agents are equipped with a model of Old High German (500-1100 AD) and Modern High German definite articles respectively, and a set of self-assessment criteria for evaluating their own linguistic performances. The experiments show that inefficiencies detected in the grammar by the Old High German agents correspond to grammatical forms that have actually undergone the most important changes in the German language. The results thus suggest that the question of language change can be reformulated as an optimization problem in which language users try to achieve their communicative goals while allocating their cognitive resources as efficiently as possible.

[1]  Manfred Bierwisch,et al.  SYNTACTIC FEATURES IN MORPHOLOGY: GENERAL PROBLEMS OF SO-CALLED PRONOMINAL INFLECTION IN GERMAN , 2008 .

[2]  An Old High-German Primer , 2010 .

[3]  Joan L. Bybee,et al.  Usage-Based Theory , 2009 .

[4]  FlickingerDan.  On building a more efficient grammar by exploiting types , 2000 .

[5]  Johannes Matiasek,et al.  ARGUMENT STRUCTURE AND CASE ASSIGN-MENT IN GERMAN , 1994 .

[6]  Remi van Trijp.  A design pattern for argument structure constructions , 2011 .

[7]  Luc Steels,et al.  How Grammar Emerges to Dampen Combinatorial Search in Parsing , 2006, EELC.

[8]  Dan Klein,et al.  Finding Cognate Groups Using Phylogenies , 2010, ACL.

[9]  Kersti Börjars,et al.  Non-Transformational Syntax: Formal and Explicit Models of Grammar , 2011 .

[10]  John Hale,et al.  The Information Conveyed by Words in Sentences , 2003, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[11]  B. Wiese.  Iconicity and syncretism , 1996 .

[12]  L. Steels.  Modeling the cultural evolution of language. , 2011, Physics of life reviews.

[13]  Walt Detmar Meurers,et al.  Constraint-based approaches to Germanic syntax , 2001 .

[14]  Berthold Crysmann,et al.  Syncretism in German: A unified approach to underspecification, indeterminacy, and likeness of case , 2005, Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

[15]  Allen Newell,et al.  Human Problem Solving. , 1973 .

[16]  Bob Carpenter,et al.  The logic of typed feature structures , 1992 .

[17]  Charles V. J. Russ,et al.  The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction , 1994 .

[18]  Luc Steels,et al.  Constructivist Development of Grounded Construction Grammar , 2004, ACL.

[19]  Luc Steels,et al.  Design patterns in fluid construction grammar , 2011 .

[20]  Thomas Wasow,et al.  Performance‐Compatible Competence Grammar , 2011 .

[21]  Morten H. Christiansen,et al.  Language as shaped by the brain. , 2008, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[22]  Remi van Trijp.  Feature Matrices and Agreement: A Case Study for German Case , 2011 .

[23]  Pieter Wellens,et al.  The Babel2 Manual , 2008 .

[24]  Remi van Trijp.  Grammaticalization and Semantic Maps: Evidence from Artificial Language , 2010 .

[25]  J. Hawkins.  Efficiency and complexity in grammars , 2004 .

[26]  Bart de Boer,et al.  Multi-Agent Simulations of the Evolution of Combinatorial Phonology , 2010, Adapt. Behav..

[27]  B. Heine,et al.  The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis , 2009 .

[28]  M. Shrier.  Case Systems in German Dialects , 1965 .

[29]  S. Levinson,et al.  Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History , 2005, Science.

[30]  April McMahon,et al.  Splits or waves? Trees or webs? How divergence measures and network analysis can unravel language histories , 2010, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[31]  Michael Cysouw,et al.  A Pipeline for Computational Historical Linguistics , 2011 .

[32]  Viveka Velupillai,et al.  Homelands of the world’s language families: a quantitative approach , 2010 .

[33]  Shobhana Lakshmi Chelliah,et al.  Introduction: The role of semantic, pragmatic and discourse factors in the development of case , 2009 .

[34]  Kenneth N Stevens,et al.  Toward a model for lexical access based on acoustic landmarks and distinctive features. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[35]  R. Gray,et al.  Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin , 2003, Nature.

[36]  Luc Steels,et al.  Unify and Merge in Fluid Construction Grammar , 2006, EELC.

[37]  Simon J. Greenhill,et al.  Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals , 2011, Nature.

[38]  Josefina Sierra Santibáñez.  Computational Issues in Fluid Construction Grammar , 2012, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[39]  J. Blevins.  Syncretism and paradigmatic opposition , 1995 .

[40]  Remi van Trijp.  Not as Awful as it Seems: Explaining German Case through Computational Experiments in Fluid Construction Grammar , 2012, EACL.

[41]  H. Clahsen,et al.  Morphological paradigms in language processing and language disorders , 2001 .

[42]  B. Wiese.  Iconicity and Syncretism. On Pronominal Inflection in Modern German , 1996 .

[43]  Michael W. Daniels.  On a Type-Based Analysis of Feature Neutrality and the Coordination of Unlikes , 2002 .

[44]  Graeme Hirst,et al.  Algorithms for language reconstruction , 2002 .

[45]  Joachim De Beule.  A Formal Deconstruction of Fluid Construction Grammar , 2012, Computational Issues in Fluid Construction Grammar.

[46]  A Design Pattern for Argument Structure Constructions , 2011 .

[47]  J. Perkell,et al.  Economy of effort in different speaking conditions. I. A preliminary study of intersubject differences and modeling issues. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[48]  Stefan Müller,et al.  An HPSG-Analysis for Free Relative Clauses in German , 1999, Grammars.

[49]  Robert Ingria,et al.  The Limits of Unification , 1990, ACL.

[50]  Katrien Beuls,et al.  Diagnostics and Repairs in Fluid Construction Grammar , 2012, Language Grounding in Robots.