It is argued that compositionality, hierarchy and recursion, generally acknowledged to be univer-sal features of human languages, can be explained as being emergent properties of the complexdynamics goveming the establishment and evolution of a language in a population of language users, mainly on an intra-generational time scale, rather than being the result of a genetic selec-tion process leading to a specialized language faculty that imposes those features upon languageor than being mainly a cross-generational cultural phenomenon. This claim is supported with results from a computational language game experiment in which a number of autonomous software agents bootstrap a common compositional and recursive language.
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