Language games: Comment on 'Modelling language evolution: Examples and predictions' by Tao Gong, Lan Shuai, Menghan Zhang

摘要

The debate on language origin and evolution has benefited from a largely interdisciplinary effort, involving linguists, anthropologists, sociologist as well as physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists. A fundamental question is whether a shared communication system can emerge from repeated interactions among individuals, not relying on any a priori or innate language-specific structure. Modeling, and in particular language games, proved to be a powerful tool to gain insight on this beautiful mystery. In particular, fruitful investigations has been done concerning the possibility for a population of individuals to exploit local communication acts to build up a shared vocabulary [1] or a system oflinguistic categories reproducing the universality and the hierarchies observed in anthropological data [2-4]. A particular effort has been also devoted to the origin of the complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures, one of the core design features of human language. As Gong and coauthors highlighted in this review [5], a combinatorial and compositional structure can emerge out of a holistic language due to communication purposes, and explaining how this could possibly happen still represents an intriguing challenge [6-11]. It is important to remark how theoretical investigations should be, and are more and more, paralleled by a growing attention to a careful comparison with data on language formation. Different kind of data can be exploited to shed light on different questions. Diachronic and historical data related to migration patterns have been used for instance to study the timescales oflanguage evolution. Anthropological studies on pre-industrialized populations [12,13] have been crucial in the understanding language universals. At the same times, experiments in cognitive science helped in shading light on the mechanisms emerging when individuals are called to perform communicative tasks [14]. It is worth mentioning in this perspective how advances in information and communication technologies allow nowadays the realization of focused experiments also in the framework of the emergence of linguistic structures exploiting the huge basin of web users. In particular, a general trend is emerging for the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run experiments in the social-sciences and whenever the contribution of human beings is crucially required for research purposes. This is opening tremendous opportunities to monitor the emergence of specific linguistic features and their co-evolution with the structure of our conceptual spaces.