Kliknij ten link, aby zobaczyć inne rodzaje publikacji na ten temat: Evolution Language.
Rozprawy doktorskie na temat „Evolution Language”
Utwórz poprawne odniesienie w stylach APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard i wielu innych
Sprawdź 50 najlepszych rozpraw doktorskich naukowych na temat „Evolution Language”.
Przycisk „Dodaj do bibliografii” jest dostępny obok każdej pracy w bibliografii. Użyj go – a my automatycznie utworzymy odniesienie bibliograficzne do wybranej pracy w stylu cytowania, którego potrzebujesz: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver itp.
Możesz również pobrać pełny tekst publikacji naukowej w formacie „.pdf” i przeczytać adnotację do pracy online, jeśli odpowiednie parametry są dostępne w metadanych.
Przeglądaj rozprawy doktorskie z różnych dziedzin i twórz odpowiednie bibliografie.
1
Livingstone, Daniel Jack. "Computer models of the evolution of language and languages". Thesis, University of the West of Scotland, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.398331.
Pełny tekst źródła
2
Eger, Steffen. "Computer simulation of language evolution". [S.l. : s.n.], 2007. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-opus-72552.
Pełny tekst źródła
3
Thomas, James Geoffrey. "Self-domestication and language evolution". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/16149.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
This thesis addresses a major problem facing any attempt to account for language structure through a cultural mechanism: The processes required by such a mechanism are only possible if we assume the existence of a range of preconditions. These preconditions are not trivial, and themselves require an explanation. In this thesis I address the nature and origin of these preconditions. I approach this topic in three stages. In the first stage, I pull-apart the functioning of one prominent cultural account of language evolution—the Iterated Learning Model —to identify the preconditions it assumes. These preconditions cluster into two main groups. The first concerns the traditional transmission of the communication system. The second relates to the emergence of particular skills of social cognition that make learned symbols and language-like communication a possibility. In the second stage, I turn to comparative evidence, looking for evolutionary analogies that might shed light on the emergence of these preconditions. Two case studies—the Bengalese finch and the domestic dog—are considered in detail, both of which show aspects of one of the preconditions emerging in the context of domestication. In each case I examine what it is about the domestication process that led to this outcome. In the final stage, I consider whether this same context might explain the emergence of these preconditions in humans. The claim that humans are a self-domesticated species has a long history, and is increasingly invoked in contemporary discussions of language evolution. However, it is often unclear exactly what this claim entails. I present a synthesis and critique of a range of empirical and theoretical perspectives on self-domestication. I conclude that human self-domestication is a coherent concept, and that there are several plausible accounts of how it might have occurred. The realisation that humans are a self-domesticated species can, therefore, provide some insight into how a cultural account of language structure might be possible at all.
4
Watanabe, Yusuke, 麗璽 鈴木, Reiji Suzuki, 隆也 有田 i Takaya Arita. "Language Evolution and the Baldwin Effect". Springer, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2237/11907.
Pełny tekst źródła
5
Kim, Anthony Hahn 1980. "Building a trajectory syntax through language evolution". Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/28433.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-82).
If we are to understand the innately human ability to solve complex problems, we must first understand the cognitive processes that allow us to combine different kinds of knowledge, to learn new things and to communicate with other people. I have built a computer simulation, based on the work of Simon Kirby, in which I show that a population of induction agents, capable of perceiving their environment and producing utterances, can develop a compositional grammar to describe the world they observe with no prior linguistic knowledge. This system expands the semantic domain proposed by Kirby which expressed meanings such as "John knows Pete" to a physical world of trajectories such as "The boy ran from the tree to the pole". In this new simulation, I demonstrate that a compositional syntax still develops if the level of semantic complexity increases over time. I then argue that using multiple representations decreases the time necessary for a compositional grammar to emerge.
by Anthony Hahn Kim.
M.Eng.
6
Feeney, Andrew Stephe. "Language evolution as a constraint on conceptions of a minimalist language faculty". Thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/2768.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Language appears to be special. Well-rehearsed arguments that appeal to aspects of language acquisition, psycholinguistic processing and linguistic universals all suggest that language has certain properties that distinguish it from other domain general capacities. The most widely discussed theory of an innate, modular, domain specific language faculty is Chomskyan generative grammar (CGG) in its various guises. However, an examination of the history and development of CGG reveals a constant tension in the relationship of syntax, phonology and semantics that has endured up to, and fatally undermines, the latest manifestation of the theory: the Minimalist Program. Evidence from language evolution can be deployed to arrive at a more coherent understanding of the nature of the human faculty for language. I suggest that all current theories can be classed on the basis of two binary distinctions: firstly, that between nativist and non-nativist accounts, and secondly between hypotheses that rely on a sudden explanation for the origins of language and those that rely on a gradual, incremental picture. All four consequent possibilities have serious flaws. By scrutinising the extant cross-disciplinary data on the evolution of hominins it becomes clear that there were two significant periods of rapid evolutionary change, corresponding to stages of punctuated equilibrium. The first of these occurred approximately two million years ago with the speciation event of Homo, saw a doubling in the size, alongside some reorganisation, of hominin brains, and resulted in the first irrefutable evidence of cognitive behaviour that distinguishes the species from that of our last common ancestor with chimpanzees. The second period began seven to eight hundred thousand years ago, again involving reorganisation and growth of the brain with associated behavioural innovations, and gave rise to modern humans by at least two hundred thousand years ago. ii I suggest that as a consequence of the first of these evolutionary breakthroughs, the species Homo erectus was endowed with a proto-‘language of thought’ (LoT), a development of the cognitive capacity evident in modern chimpanzees, accompanied by a gestural, and then vocal, symbolic protolanguage. The second breakthrough constituted a great leap involving the emergence of advanced theory of mind and a fully recursive, creative LoT. I propose that the theory outlined in the Representational Hypothesis (RH) clarifies an understanding of the nature of language as having evolved to represent externally this wholly internal, universal LoT, and it is the latter which is the sole locus of syntax and semantics. By clearly distinguishing between a phonological system for semiotic representation, and that which it represents, a syntactico-semantic LoT, the RH offers a fully logical and consistent understanding of the human faculty for language. Language may have the appearance of domain specific properties, but this is entirely derived from both the nature of that which it represents, and the natural constraints of symbolic representation.
7
Cornish, Hannah. "Language adapts : exploring the cultural dynamics of iterated learning". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5603.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Human languages are not just tools for transmitting cultural ideas, they are themselves culturally transmitted. This single observation has major implications for our understanding of how and why languages around the world are structured the way they are, and also for how scientists should be studying them. Accounting for the origins of what turns out to be such a uniquely human ability is, and should be, a priority for anyone interested in what makes us different from every other lifeform on Earth. The way the scientific community thinks about language has seen considerable changes over the years. In particular, we have witnessed movements away from a purely descriptive science of language, towards a more explanatory framework that is willing to embrace the difficult questions of not just how individual languages are currently structured and used, but also how and why they got to be that way in the first place. Seeing languages as historical entities is, of course, nothing new in linguistics. Seeing languages as complex adaptive systems, undergoing processes of evolution at multiple levels of interaction however, is. Broadly speaking, this thesis explores some of the implications that this perspective on language has, and argues that in addition to furthering our understanding of the processes of biological evolution and the mechanisms of individual learning required specifically for language, we also need to be mindful of the less well-understood cultural processes that mediate between the two. Human communication systems are not just direct expressions of our genes. Neither are they independently acquired by learners anew at every generation. Instead, languages are transmitted culturally from one generation to another, creating an opportunity for a different kind of evolutionary channel to exist. It is a central aim of this thesis to explore some of the adaptive dynamics that such a cultural channel has, and investigate the extent to which certain structural and statistical properties of language can be directly explained as adaptations to the transmission process and the learning biases of speakers. In order to address this aim, this thesis takes an experimental approach. Building on a rich set of empirical results from various computational simulations and mathematical models, it presents a novel methodological framework for exploring one type of cultural transmission mechanism, iterated learning, in the laboratory using human participants. In these experiments, we observe the evolution of artificial languages as they are acquired and then transmitted to new learners. Although there is no communication involved in these studies, and participants are unaware that their learning efforts are being propagated to future learners, we find that many functional features of language emerge naturally from the different constraints imposed upon them during transmission. These constraints can take a variety of forms, both internal and external to the learner. Taken collectively, the data presented here suggest several points: (i) that iterated language learning experiments can provide us with new insights about the emergence and evolution of language; (ii) that language-like structure can emerge as a result of cultural transmission alone; and (iii) that whilst structure in these systems has the appearance of design, and is in some sense ‘created’ by intentional beings, its emergence is in fact wholly the result of non-intentional processes. Put simply, cultural evolution plays a vital role in language. This work extends our framework for understanding it, and offers a new method for investigating it.
8
Ferdinand, Vanessa Anne. "Inductive evolution : cognition, culture, and regularity in language". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/11741.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Cultural artifacts, such as language, survive and replicate by passing from mind to mind. Cultural evolution always proceeds by an inductive process, where behaviors are never directly copied, but reverse engineered by the cognitive mechanisms involved in learning and production. I will refer to this type of evolutionary change as inductive evolution and explain how this represents a broader class of evolutionary processes that can include both neutral and selective evolution. This thesis takes a mechanistic approach to understanding the forces of evolution underlying change in culture over time, where the mechanisms of change are sought within human cognition. I define culture as anything that replicates by passing through a cognitive system and take language as a premier example of culture, because of the wealth of knowledge about linguistic behaviors (external language) and its cognitive processing mechanisms (internal language). Mainstream cultural evolution theories related to social learning and social transmission of information define culture ideationally, as the subset of socially-acquired information in cognition that affects behaviors. Their goal is to explain behaviors with culture and avoid circularity by defining behaviors as markedly not part of culture. I take a reductionistic approach and argue that all there is to culture is brain states and behaviors, and further, that a complete explanation of the forces of cultural change can not be explained by a subset of cognition related to social learning, but necessarily involves domain-general mechanisms, because cognition is an integrated system. Such an approach should decompose culture into its constituent parts and explore 1) how brains states effect behavior, 2) how behavior effects brain states, and 3) how brain states and behaviors change over time when they are linked up in a process of cultural transmission, where one person's behavior is the input to another. I conduct several psychological experiments on frequency learning with adult learners and describe the behavioral biases that alter the frequencies of linguistic variants over time. I also fit probabilistic models of cognition to participant data to understand the inductive biases at play during linguistic frequency learning. Using these inductive and behavioral biases, I infer a Markov model over my empirical data to extrapolate participants' behavior forward in cultural evolutionary time and determine equivalences (and divergences) between inductive evolution and standard models from population genetics. As a key divergence point, I introduce the concept of non-binomial cultural drift, argue that this is a rampant form of neutral evolution in culture, and empirically demonstrate that probability matching is one such inductive mechanism that results in non-binomial cultural drift. I argue further that all inductive problems involving representativeness are potential drivers of neutral evolution unique to cultural systems. I also explore deviations from probability matching and describe non-neutral evolution due to inductive regularization biases in a linguistic and non-linguistic domain. Here, I offer a new take on an old debate about the domain-specificity vs -generality of the cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing, and show that the evolution of regularity in language cannot be predicted in isolation from the general cognitive mechanisms involved in frequency learning. Using my empirical data on regularization vs probability matching, I demonstrate how the use of appropriate non-binomial null hypotheses offers us greater precision in determining the strength of selective forces in cultural evolution.
9
Simmonds, Helen Margaret. "Channelling change : evolution in Guernsey Norman French phonology". Thesis, University of Exeter, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/9246.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
This thesis examines evolution in the phonology of Guernesiais, the endangered variety of Norman French indigenous to the Channel Island of Guernsey. It identifies ways in which modern Guernesiais phonology differs from previous descriptions of the variety written between 1870 and 2008, and identifies new patterns of phonological variation which correlate with speaker place of origin within the island. This is accomplished through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of a new corpus of speech data. The relationship between the data and other extralinguistic variables such as age and gender is also explored. The Guernsey 2010 corpus was gathered during linguistic interviews held with forty-nine adult native speakers of Guernesiais between July and September 2010. The interviews featured a word list translation task (English > Guernesiais), a series of socio-biographical questions, and a self-assessment questionnaire which sought to elicit information about the participants’ use of Guernesiais as well as their responses to questions relating to language revitalisation issues. The interviews resulted in over 40 hours of recorded material in addition to a bank of written socio-biographical, behavioural and attitudinal data. Analysis of the phonetically transcribed data revealed that a number of phonological features of Guernesiais have evolved, perhaps owing to greater contact with English or through other processes of language change such as levelling. Shifting patterns of diatopic variation indicate that south-western Guernesiais forms are spreading northwards, and this is echoed in the findings of the socio-biographical data. New evidence of diatopic variation in final consonant devoicing and word-final post-obstruent liquid deletion was also found. This thesis concludes that there is still considerable variation in the pronunciation of modern native speakers of Guernesiais, and that this correlates with place of origin within the island. While northern Guernesiais forms have not disappeared entirely, south-western Guernesiais appears set to become the de facto standard for the variety, especially as the political impetus for revitalisation is generated from this area of the island.
10
Herrmann, Kai, Hannes Voigt, Andreas Behrend i Wolfgang Lehner. "CoDEL - A Relationally Complete Language for Database Evolution". Saechsische Landesbibliothek- Staats- und Universitaetsbibliothek Dresden, 2016. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa-202851.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Software developers adapt to the fast-moving nature of software systems with agile development techniques. However, database developers lack the tools and concepts to keep pace. Data, already existing in a running product, needs to be evolved accordingly, usually by manually written SQL scripts. A promising approach in database research is to use a declarative database evolution language, which couples both schema and data evolution into intuitive operations. Existing database evolution languages focus on usability but did not aim for completeness. However, this is an inevitable prerequisite for reasonable database evolution to avoid complex and error-prone workarounds. We argue that relational completeness is the feasible expressiveness for a database evolution language. Building upon an existing language, we introduce CoDEL. We define its semantic using relational algebra, propose a syntax, and show its relational completeness.
11
Hawkey, David J. C. "Beyond the individual in the evolution of language". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/4229.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
This thesis concerns the evolution of language. A proliferation of theoretical models have been presented in recent years purporting to offer evolutionary accounts for various aspects of modern languages. These models rely heavily on abstract mechanistic models of the production and reception of language by modern humans, drawn from various approaches in linguistics which aim at such models. A very basic and ubiquitous assumption is that expressions have meaning in virtue of being associated with internal representations, and that therefore the evolution of language can be modelled on the basis of individuals trying to produce external manifestations of these internal “meanings”. I examine the role of this assumption in language evolution theorising, and review evidence from neuroscience and first language acquisition relevant to the validity of this assumption. The chaotic nature of the relationship between “meaning” and the brain undermines the supposition that the evolution of language was driven by spontaneous association between internal structures and external forms. I then turn to the philosophical basis of language evolution theorising, adopting a Wittgensteinian perspective on the cognitive interpretation of linguistic theories. I argue that the theoretical apparatus of such approaches is embedded in language games whose complicated rules relate to linguistic behaviour (and idealisations of that behaviour) but not to neural organisation. The reinterpretation of such descriptions of language as descriptions of the internal structures of language users is rejected as a grammatical confusion: if the rules for constructing linguistic theory descriptions do not mention neural structures, then theoretical descriptions of the linguistic abilities of an individual say nothing non-trivial about their internal brain structure. I do not deny that it would, in principle, be possible to reduce linguistic theories (reinterpreted as mechanistic descriptions) to neural structures, but claim that this possibility is guaranteed only by leaving the practice of re-describing physical brain descriptions entirely unconstrained. Thus the idea that we can reasonably infer the behaviour of humans and prehumans in more primitive communicative environments by manipulation of the models of linguistic theories is unfounded: we have no idea how such a manipulation would translate into statements about neural organisation, and so no idea how plausible such statements about earlier neural organisation (and the resultant behaviours) are. As such, cognitive interpretations of linguistic theories provide no better ground for statements about behaviour during earlier stages in the evolution of language than guessing. Rejecting internal-mechanism based accounts as unfounded leaves the evolution of language unexplained. In the latter parts of this thesis, I offer a more neutral approach which is sensitive to the limited possibilities available for making predictions about human (and pre-human) behaviour at earlier stages in the evolution of language. Rather than focusing on the individual and imputed internal language machinery, the account considers the communicative affordances available to individuals. The shifts in what individuals can learn to do in interaction with others, that result in turn from the learning of interactive practices by others, form the basis of this account. General trends in the development of communicative affordances are used to account for generalisations over attested semantic change, and to suggest how certain aspects of modern language use developed without simply assuming that it is “natural” for humans to (spontaneously) behave in these ways. The model is used in an account of the evolution and common structure of colour terms across different languages.
12
Kershaw, Daniel. "Language change and evolution in Online Social Networks". Thesis, Lancaster University, 2018. http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/129787/.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Language is in constant flux, whether through the creation of new terms or the changing meanings of existing words. The process by which language change happens is through complex reinforcing interactions between individuals and the social structures in which they exist. There has been much research into language change and evolution, though this has involved manual processes that are both time consuming and costly. However, with the growth in popularity of osn, for the first time, researchers have access to fine-grained records of language and user interactions that not only contain data on the creation of these language innovations but also reveal the inter-user and inter-community dynamics that influence their adoptions and rejections. Having access to these osn datasets means that language change and evolution can now be assessed and modelled through the application of computational and machine-learning-based methods. Therefore, this thesis looks at how one can detect and predict language change in osn, as well as the factors that language change depends on. The answer to this over-arching question lies in three core components: first, detecting the innovations; second, modelling the individual user adoption process; and third, looking at the collective adoption across a network of individuals. In the first question, we operationalise traditional language acceptance heuristics (used to detect the emergence of new words) into three classes of computation time-series measures computing the variation in frequency, form and/or meaning. The grounded methods are applied to two osn, with results demonstrating the ability to detect language change across both networks. By additionally applying the methods to communities within each network, e.g. geographical regions, on Twitter and Subreddits in Reddit, the results indicate that language variation and change can be dependent on the community memberships. The second question in this thesis focuses on the process of users adopting language innovations in relation to other users with whom they are in contact. By modelling influence between users as a function of past innovation cascades, we compute a global activation threshold at which users adopt new terms dependent on exposure to them from their neighbours. Additionally, by testing the user interaction networks through random shuffles, we show that the time at which a user adopts a term is dependent on the local structure; however, a large part of the influence comes from sources external to the observed osn. The final question looks at how the speakers of a language are embedded in social networks, and how the networks' resulting structures and dynamics influence language usage and adoption patterns. We show that language innovations diffuse across a network in a predictable manner, which can be modelled using structural, grammatical and temporal measures, using a logistic regression model to predict the vitality of the diffusion. With regard to network structure, we show how innovations that manifest across structural holes and weak ties diffuse deeper across the given network. Beyond network influence, our results demonstrate that the grammatical context through which innovations emerge also play an essential role in diffusion dynamics - this indicates that the adoption of new words is enabled by a complex interplay of both network and linguistic factors. The three questions are used to answer the over-arching question, showing that one can, indeed, model language change and forecast user and community adoption of language innovations. Additionally, we also show the ability to apply grounded models and methods and apply them within a scalable computational framework. However, it is a challenging process that is heavily influenced by the underlying processes that are not recorded within the data from the osns.
13
Zuidema, Willem H. "The major transitions in the evolution of language". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/25359.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
I first review a number of foundational mathematical models from three branches of evolutionary biology – population genetics, evolutionary game theory and social evolution theory – and discuss the relation between them. This discussion yields a list of 9 requirements on evolutionary scenarios for language, and highlights the assumptions implicit in the various formalisms. I then look in more details at one specific step-by-step scenario, proposed by Ray Jackendoff, and consider the linguistic formalisms that could be used to characterise the evolutionary transitions from one stage to the next. I conclude from this review that the main challenges in evolutionary linguistic are to explain how three major linguistic innovations – combinatorial phonology, compositional semantics and hierarchical phrase-structure – could have spread through a population where they are initially rare. In the second part of the thesis, I critically evaluate some existing formal models of each of these major transitions and present three novel alternatives. In an abstract model of the evolution of speech sounds (viewed as trajectories through an acoustic space), I show that combinatorial phonology is a solution for robustness against noise and the only evolutionary stable strategy (ESS). In a model of the evolution of simple lexicons in a noisy environment, I show that the optimal lexicon uses a structural mapping from meanings to sounds, providing a rudimentary compositional semantics. Lexicons with this property are also ESS’s. Finally, in a model of the evolution and acquisition of context-free grammars, I evaluate the conditions under which hierarchical phrase-structure will be favoured by natural selection, or will be the outcome of a process of cultural evolution. In the third and final part of the thesis, I discuss the implications of these models for the debates in linguistics on innateness and learnability, and on the nature of language universals. A mainly negative point to make is that formal learnability results cannot be used as evidence for an innate, language-specific specialisation for language. A positive point is that with the evolutionary models of language, we can begin to understand how universal properties and tendencies in natural languages can result from the intricate interaction between innate learning biases and a process of cultural evolution over many generations.
14
Spike, Matthew John. "Minimal requirements for the cultural evolution of language". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/25930.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Human language is both a cognitive and a cultural phenomenon. Any evolutionary account of language, then, must address both biological and cultural evolution. In this thesis, I give a mainly cultural evolutionary answer to two main questions: firstly, how do working systems of learned communication arise in populations in the absence of external or internal guidance? Secondly, how do those communication systems take on the fundamental structural properties found in human languages, i.e. systematicity at both a meaningless and meaningful level? A large, multi-disciplinary literature exists for each question, full of apparently conflicting results and analyses. My aim in this thesis is to survey this work, so as to find any commonalities and bring this together in order to provide a minimal account of the cultural evolution of language. The first chapter of this thesis takes a number of well-established models of the emergence of signalling systems. These are taken from several different fields: evolutionary linguistics, evolutionary game theory, philosophy, artificial life, and cognitive science. By using a common framework to directly compare these models, I show that three underlying commonalities determine the ability of any population of agents to reliably develop optimal signalling. The three requirements are that i) agents can create and transfer referential information, ii) there is a systemic bias against ambiguity, and iii) some mechanism leading to information loss exists. Following this, I extend the model to determine the effects of including referential uncertainty. I show that, for the group of models to which this applies, this places certain extra restrictions on the three requirements stated above. In the next chapter, I use an information-theoretic framework to construct a novel analysis of signalling games in general, and rephrase the three requirements in more formal terms. I then show that we can use these 3 criteria as a diagnostic for determining whether any given signalling game will lead to optimal signalling, without the requirement for repeated simulations. In the final, much longer, chapter, I address the topic of duality of patterning. This involves a lengthy review of the literature on duality of patterning, combinatoriality, and compositionality. I then argue that both levels of systematicity can be seen as a functional adaptation which maintains communicative accuracy in the face of noisy processes at different levels of analysis. I support this with results from a new, minimally-specified model, which also clarifies and informs a number of long-fought debates within the field.
15
Roberts, Andrew Gareth Vaughan. "Cooperation, social selection, and language change : an experimental investigation of language divergence". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5852.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
In this thesis, I use an experimental model to investigate the role of social pressures in stimulating language divergence. Research into the evolution of cooperation has emphasised the usefulness of ingroup markers for swiftly identifying outsiders, who pose a threat to cooperative networks. Mechanisms for avoiding cheats and freeriders, which tend to rely on reputation, or on (explicit and implicit) contracts between individuals, are considerably less effective against short-term visitors. Outsiders, moreover, may behave according to different social norms, which may adversely affect cooperative interactions with them. There are many sources of markers by which insiders and outsiders can be distinguished, but language is a particularly impressive one. If human beings exploit linguistic variation for this purpose, we might expect the exploitation to have an influence on the cultural evolution of language, and to be involved in language divergence, since it introduces a selective pressure, by which linguistic variants are selected on the basis of their social significance. However, there is also a neutral, mechanistic model of dialect formation that relies on unconscious accommodation between interlocutors, coupled with variation in the frequency of interaction, to account for divergence. In studies of real-world communities, these factors are difficult to tease apart. The model described in this thesis put real speakers in the artificial environment of a computer game. A game consisted of a series of rounds in which players were paired up with each other in a pseudo-random order. During a round, pairs of players exchanged typed messages in a highly restricted artificial "alien language". Each player began the game with a certain number of points, distributed between various resources, and the purpose of sending messages was to negotiate to exchange these resources. Any points given away were worth double to the receiver, so, by exchanging resources, players could accumulate points for their team. However, the pairings were anonymous: until the end of a round, players were not told who they had been paired with. This basic paradigm allowed the investigation of the major factors influencing language divergence, as well as the small-scale individual strategies that contribute to it. Two major factors were manipulated: frequency of interaction and competitiveness. In one condition, all players in a game were working together; in another condition, players were put into teams, such that giving away resources to teammates was advantageous, but giving them to opponents was not. This put a pressure on players to use variation in the alien language to mark identity. A combination of this pressure and a minimum level of interaction between teammates was found to be sufficient for the alien language to diverge into "dialects". Neither factor was sufficient on its own. The results of these experiments suggest that a pressure for the socially based selection of linguistic variants can lead to divergence in a very short time, given sufficient levels of interaction between members of a group.
16
Thompson, William David. "Transmission, induction and evolution". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/11766.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Many human behaviours are thought to depend upon cognitive capacities enriched with innate domain-specific knowledge. Underpinning this view is the hypothesis that evolution can shape cognition to include strong innate inductive biases. In this thesis, I re-examine that hypothesis with respect to a broad class of behaviours: those that we learn from other individuals. Taking human language as a test case, I present an analysis of the co-evolutionary process that underpins the formation of innate constraints on cognition for behaviours that are culturally transmitted through inductive inference. I derive a series of mathematical models of this process, built around Bayesian models of cognition and cultural transmission, and ask how they can inform our expectations about cognition in a cultural species. I argue that the traditional marriage of nativism and evolutionary reasoning is undermined by this process, as is the suggestion that cognitive adaptation to cultural behaviours is outright implausible. I explore the co-evolutionary dynamics induced by cultural transmission, and conclude that they can radically manipulate the evolution of cognition: culture can intervene in the formation of hard-wired knowledge, but nevertheless facilitate rapid cognitive adaptation. The analyses I report make strong, testable predictions about the nature of inductive biases for cultural behaviours, and offer solutions to a number of long-standing conundrums in the evolution of language.
17
FERGUSON, LORI K. "Evolution of Pre-Service Teachers’ Definitions and Practices of Academic Language and Mathematical Language". University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1592136880245101.
Pełny tekst źródła
18
Marketos, Paul Richard. "The evolution of feminist utopias". Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21614.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Bibliography: pages 172-175.The genre of feminist utopias has its origin in the first wave of feminism which rose up in the late nineteenth century. This dissertation follows the evolution the genre, focusing on the changes it reflects in the strategies of utopian writing and, more specifically, on the developments that have occurred within feminism itself. The first feminist utopia, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, is examined in chapter one. The novel, by depicting a productive and peaceful society consisting only of women, dramatises the belief that the economic dependence of women was not only an artificial and discriminatory system but one which also, by adversely affecting the functioning of society as a whole, retarded the progress of socialism, which political philosophy informed much of early feminist thought. The bulk of the works brought under discussion were written in the 1970s, the period of the second wave of feminism. These works reflect the radical beliefs of the time, which was one of growing reaction against form and formalism, and also the growing rifts within the feminist movement itself. Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres and Marge piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time echo the call for the recognition of androgyny that was voiced in the sixties and seventies. The utopian societies they depict, worlds without gender, advance the view of gender itself as an artificial construct, created by sociology not physiology. They denounce the belief that there can be "equality within difference". In contrast to the politics reflected by these two works, those expressed in Suzy Mckee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World, Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wanderground and Joanna Russ's The Female Man, present gender difference as a serious (or, in Gearhart's work, insurmountable) obstacle in the path of women's liberation. In the singlesex societies that they depict, these works espouse separation by women from men as necessary either as a strategy in the struggle for liberation or as an escape from the inequities of patriarchy. The rise of the New Right in the 1980s, the combined movements of, amongst others, religious conservatism and antifeminism, the latter being supported mainly by women, has resulted in an acceptance of the political infeasibility of all women uniting to form a front against patriarchy. Also, studies in the fields of both neurology and psychology began to indicate conclusively the existence of difference between the genders, which has weakened the call for androgyny, causing feminist utopian writers to seek ways of depicting "equality within difference". The utopias written in the late eighties reflect this change in political emphasis. Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale acknowledge the existence of gender difference, and do not depict a binary division existing between men and women with regard to the promulgation of patriarchy. They are also critical of the religious fundamentalist backlash against feminism that was loosed in the early eighties. The final chapter traces the evolution of Ursula Le Guin's utopian thought, focusing especially on her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home. Le Guin's utopian writing, which espouses her belief in pacifist anarchism, has become more radical and less conservative over time, a trend contrary to that of the genre in general
19
De, Villiers Tanya. "Mind and language : evolution in contemporary theories of cognition". Thesis, Link to the online version, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/1092.
Pełny tekst źródła
20
Turner, Huck. "The evolution of language universals : optimal design and adaptation". Thesis, University of Plymouth, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/1873.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Inquiry into the evolution of syntactic universals is hampered by severe limitations on the available evidence. Theories of selective function nevertheless lead to predictions of local optimaliiy that can be tested scientifically. This thesis refines a diagnostic, originally proposed by Parker and Maynard Smith (1990), for identifying selective functions on this basis and applies it to the evolution of two syntactic universals: (I) the distinction between open and closed lexical classes, and (2) nested constituent structure. In the case of the former, it is argued that the selective role of the closed class items is primarily to minimise the amount of redundancy in the lexicon. In the case of the latter, the emergence of nested phrase structure is argued to have been a by-product of selection for the ability to perform insertion operations on sequences - a function that plausibly pre-dated the emergence of modem language competence. The evidence for these claims is not just that these properties perform plausibly fitness-related functions, but that they appear to perform them in a way that is improbably optimal. A number of interesting findings follow when examining the selective role of the closed classes. In particular, case, agreement and the requirement that sentences have subjects are expected consequences of an optimised lexicon, the theory thereby relating these properties to natural selection for the first time. It also motivates the view that language variation is confined to parameters associated with closed class items, in turn explaining why parameter confiicts fail to arise in bilingualism. The simplest representation of sequences that is optimised for efficient insertions can represent both nested constituent structure and long-distance dependencies in a unified way, thus suggesting that movement is intrinsic to the representation of constituency rather than an 'imperfection'. The basic structure of phrases also follows from this representation and helps to explain the interaction between case and theta assignment. These findings bring together a surprising array of phenomena, reinforcing its correctness as the representational basis of syntactic structures. The diagnostic overcomes shortcomings in the approach of Pinker and Bloom (1990), who argued that the appearance of 'adaptive complexity' in the design of a trait could be used as evidence of its selective function, but there is no reason to expect the refinements of natural selection to increase complexity in any given case. Optimality considerations are also applied in this thesis to filter theories of the nature of unobserved linguistic representations as well as theories of their functions. In this context, it is argued that, despite Chomsky's (1995) resistance to the idea, it is possible to motivate the guiding principles of the Minimalist Program in terms of evolutionary optimisation, especially if we allow the possibility that properties of language were selected for non-communicative functions and that redundancy is sometimes costly rather than beneficial.
21
Saldana, Carmen Catalina. "Simplifying linguistic complexity : culture and cognition in language evolution". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/31395.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Languages are culturally transmitted through a repeated cycle of learning and communicative interaction. These two aspects of cultural transmission impose (at least) three interacting pressures that can shape the evolution of linguistic structure: a pressure for learnability, a pressure for expressivity, and a pressure for coordination amongst users in a linguistic community. This thesis considers how these sometimes competing pressures impact linguistic complexity across cultural time. Using artificial language and iterated learning experimental paradigms, I investigate the conditions under which complexity in morphological and syntactic systems emerges, spreads, and reduces. These experiments illustrate the interaction of transmission, learning and use in hitherto understudied domains - morphosyntax and word order. In a first study (Chapter 2), I report the first iterated learning experiments to investigate the evolution of complexity in compositional structure at the word and sentence level. I demonstrate that a complex meaning space paired with pressures for learnability and communication can result in compositional hierarchical constituent structure, including fixed combinatorial rules of word formation and word order. This structure grants a productive and productively interpretable language and only requires learners to acquire a finite lexicon and a finite set of combinatorial rules (i.e., a grammar). In Chapter 3, I address the unique effect of communicative interaction on linguistic complexity, by removing language learning completely. Speakers use their native language to express novel meanings either in isolation or during communicative interaction. I demonstrate that even in this case, communicative interaction leads to more efficient and overall simpler linguistic systems. These first two studies provide support for the claim that morphological and syntactic complexity are shaped by an overarching drive towards simplicity (or learnability) in language learning and communication. Chapter 4 reports a series of experiments assessing the possibility that the simplicity bias found in the first two studies operates at a different strength depending on the linguistic level. Studies in natural language learning and in pidgin/creole genesis suggest that while morphological variation seems to be highly susceptible to regularisation, variation in other syntactic features, like word order, appears more likely to be reproduced. I test this experimentally by comparing regularisation of unconditioned variation across morphology and word order in the context of artificial language learning. I show that language users in fact regularise unconditioned variation in a similar way across linguistic levels, suggesting that the simplicity bias may be driven by a single, non-level-specific mechanism. Taken together, the experimental evidence presented in this thesis supports the hypothesis that the cultural and cognitive pressures acting on language users during learning and communicative interaction - for learnability, expressivity and coordination - are at least partially responsible for the evolution of linguistic complexity. Specifically, they are responsible for the emergence of linguistic complexity which maximises learnability and communicative efficiency, and for the reduction of complexity which does not. More generally, the approach taken in this thesis promotes a view of complexity in linguistic systems as an evolving variable determined by the biases of language learners and users as languages are culturally transmitted.
22
Newman, Christian D. "A SOURCE CODE TRANSFORMATION LANGUAGE TO SUPPORT SOFTWARE EVOLUTION". Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1500560236029486.
Pełny tekst źródła
23
Poulshock, Joseph W. "Language and morality : evolution, altruism, and linguistic moral mechanisms". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/25094.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
This thesis inquires into how human language relates to morality – and shows the ways language enables, extends, and maintains human value systems. Though we ultimately need to view the relation between language and morality from many different perspectives – biological, psychological, sociological, and philosophical – the approach here is primarily a linguistic one informed by evolutionary theory. At first, this study shows how natural selection relates to the problem of altruism and how language serves human moral ontogeny. Subsequently, the argument demonstrates how language helps enable cultural group selection. Moreover, as language helps influence human behaviour in an altruistic direction beyond in-group non-kin (helping facilitate cultural group selection), we also consider how language can help facilitate altruistic behaviour towards out-group non-kin. This therefore raises the prospect of a limited moral realism in a world of evolutionary processes. With these issues and possibilities in mind, we consider and analyze the properties of language that help extend human morality. Specifically, discussion covers how recursion, linguistic creativity, naming ability, displacement, stimulus freedom, compositionality, cultural transmission, and categorization extend moral systems. Moreover, because language so broadly influences morality, the inquiry extends into how linguistic differences (specifically between English and Japanese) might also cause subtle differences in moral perception between Japanese and English speakers. Lastly, we consider how moral ideas might take on a life of their own, catalytically propagating in degrees dependent and independent of human intention.
24
Shi, Jianguo. "The Shuyang dialect: a study in its historical evolution /". The Ohio State University, 1994. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487849377296651.
Pełny tekst źródła
25
Silvey, Catriona Anne. "Communicative emergence and cultural evolution of word meanings". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/16462.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
The question of how language evolved has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Compared to seemingly more complex phenomena such as syntax, word meanings are usually seen as relatively easy to explain. Mainstream accounts in psycholinguistics and evolutionary linguistics assume that word meanings correspond to stable concepts which are prior to language and derive straightforwardly from human perception of structure in the world. Taking a cognitive linguistic approach based on psycholinguistic evidence, I argue instead that word meanings are conventions, grounded, learned and used in the context of communication. The meaning of a word is the sum of its contexts of use, with particular features of these contexts made more or less salient by mechanisms of attentional learning and communicative inference. Evolutionarily, word meanings arise as an emergent product of humans’ adapted tendency to infer each other’s intentions using contextual cues. They are then shaped over cultural evolution by the need to be learnable and useful for communication. This thesis presents a series of experiments that test the effect of these pressures on the origins and development of word meanings. Experiment 1 investigates the origins of strong tendencies for words to specify features on particular dimensions (such as the shape bias). The results show that these tendencies arise via attentional learning effects amplified by iterated learning. Dimensions which are less salient in contexts of learning and use drop out of word meanings as they are passed down a chain of learners. Experiments 2, 3 and 4 investigate the structure of word meanings produced during either paired communication games or individual labelling of images by similarity. While communication alone leads to word meanings that are unstructured and poorly aligned within pairs, communication plus iterated learning leads to word meanings that increase in structure and alignment over generations. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates the interaction of event structure and developing conventions in shaping word meanings. The structure of events in an artificial world is shown to influence lexicalisation patterns in the languages conventionalised by communicating pairs. Event features that are less predictable across communicative contexts tend to be more strongly associated with the conventions in the language. Overall, the experiments show that rather than straightforwardly reflecting pre-linguistic conceptualisation, word meanings are also dynamically shaped by learning and communication. In addition, these processes are constrained by the conventions that already exist within a language. This illuminates the mixture of convergence and diversity we see in word meanings in natural languages, and gives insight into their evolutionary origins.
26
Zhang, Qing. "The Role of Vocal Learning in Language. Evolution and Development". Doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/459061.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Vocal learning, one of the subcomponents of language, is put at center stage in this dissertation. The overall hypothesis is that vocal learning lays the foundation for both language evolution (phylogeny) and development (ontogeny), and also high-level cognition. The computational ability found in vocal learning is seen as so enhanced in humans as to yield the kind of recursion that supports language. Empirical evidence on vocal learning in nonhuman animals and humans from behavioral, neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, genetic, and evolutionary fields is suggestive that vocal learning interacts with other cognitive domains at multiple levels. The positive correlation between the hippocampal volume and open-ended vocal production in avian vocal learning species suggests the possible involvement of the hippocampus in vocal learning. The empirical studies of foxp2 in nonhuman animals and humans suggest that foxp2 plays a role in multimodal communication and general cognition.
Phylogenetically, Sapiens’ vocal learning abilities are unique among primates. Compared with nonhuman primates, our species possesses stronger and more enhanced connections between the superior temporal cortex and premotor cortex as well as the striatum. In Sapiens, meaning aside, vocal learning as such can explain many features found in speech and its ontogeny such as the specialized auditory mechanism for speech, the preferential attention to speech in newborns, the primacy of vocal imitation among multimodal (visual and auditory) imitative skills and the stages seen in learning to speak.
All these characteristics seem to be different and abnormal, albeit to different degrees, in autism. A 25-30% of the autistic population is non/minimally verbal but even the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum presents with abnormalities, such as difficulties in processing speed and an impaired imitative capacity that could be satisfactorily explained if language entered again the definition (and diagnosis) of what autism is, with an special emphasis on vocal learning.El vocal learning, un dels subcomponents del llenguatge, ocupa un espai central en aquesta tesi. La hipòtesi general és que el vocal learning constitueix el fonament de l’evolució (filogènia) i del desenvolupament (ontogènia) lingüístics, i també de la cognició. L'habilitat computacional que es dóna en el vocal learning es veu en els humans tan potenciada com per ser la base del tipus de recursió en què es basa el llenguatge. Proves empíriques sobre el vocal learning en animals no humans i en humans, des de camps que inclouen des del comportament, la neuroanatomia, la neurofisiologia, la genètica i la teoria de l’evolució, suggereixen que el vocal learning interactua amb altres dominis cognitius a molts i diferents nivells. Filogenèticamet, les habilitats de vocal learning en el Sapiens són úniques entre els primats. Comparada amb els primats no humans, la nostra espècie posseeix unes connexions més denses i potents entre el còrtex temporal superior i el còrtex premotor així com l’estriat. En el Sapiens, deixant de banda el significat, el vocal learning tot sol pot explicar molts trets de la parla i la seva ontogènia com ara l’especialització auditiva per a la parla, l’atenció preferent a la parla en els nadons, la primacia de la imitació vocal entre les habilitats imitatives multimodals (de base visual i auditiva), i els estadis que s’observen en l’adquisició de la parla. Totes aquestes característiques sembla que són diferents i anòmales, tot i que en diferent graus, en l’autisme. Un 25-30% de la població autista és no verbal o mínimament però fins i tot a la banda de l’espectre autista que es considera d’alt funcionament s’hi donen anomalies, tal com ara un cert dèficit en velocitat de processament i una capacitat deficient d’imitació, que podrien explicar-se més satisfactòriament si un dèficit de llenguatge entrés altra vegada a la definició (i diagnòstic) del que és l’autisme, amb un èmfasi especial en el vocal learning.
27
Wada, Tazuru. "TEACHER CHANGE: A CASE STUDY OF THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE". Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2016. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/389700.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Teaching & LearningEd.D.
This study is a qualitative inquiry of eight mid-career second language (L2) teachers’ identity evolution. These teachers have or had full-time or tenured teaching experience in secondary schools in Japan. Since they were mid- and later career teachers, they have explored their development, what they are now, and why they keep growing. They have all made meaningful voluntary changes in their professional lives. To make meaningful voluntary changes at moments of transitions, the teachers have made choices and negotiated, or juggled, their identities. They are successful teachers who have tenaciously pursued what matters to themselves professionally throughout their lives. One unfilled niche in the L2 teacher development and education is research on redefining L2 teachers who began their careers in secondary education in Japan, make meaningful voluntary changes in mid-career, and make apparently difficult work situations negotiable. The three purposes of this study are to (a) explore why and how L2 teachers’ identity evolution and their professional growth at mid-career happen; (b) learn more about the complexity of teacher change mechanisms at mid-career, and; (c) highlight ways that teachers whose professional development has stalled can grow out of their stagnation by examining the lives of successful mid-career and later career teachers. Eight L2 teachers participated in this study, recruited between 2005 and 2010. Interviews are the main source of data collection. I triangulated the data with email exchanges, class visits, and public documents such as Curriculum Vitae, syllabi, and curriculum descriptions given to students in a current or former class, handouts used in class, and published research articles. The data analysis was grounded in Riessman’s (2008) thematic and structural narrative analysis for identity evolution. Using these frameworks, I analyzed the data by(a) looking for stories and events in the telling as well as searching for identity negotiation and evolution with the participants with thematic analysis, which applied to all the participants, and (b) seeking contextual, discursive, and interpersonal cohesion and meanings with structural narrative analysis, which was applied to one participant. What each participant deemed important determined what kind of L2 teacher they wanted to become. With their efforts to keep evolving as L2 teachers through reflection, action, and negotiation they became consciously aware of what mattered to them. Their conscious awareness prompted them to exercise agency to plan meaningful changes.
Temple University--Theses
28
Moy, Joanna. "Word order and case in models of simulated language evolution". Thesis, University of York, 2005. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/9906/.
Pełny tekst źródła
29
Smith, Kenneth. "The transmission of language : models of biological and cultural evolution". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/27427.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Theories of language evolution typically attribute its unique structure to pressures acting on the genetic transmission of a language faculty and on the cultural transmission of language itself. In strongly biological accounts, natural selection acting on the genetic transmission of the language faculty is seen as the key determinant of linguistic structure, with culture relegated to a relatively minor role. Strongly cultural accounts place greater emphasis on the role of learning in shaping language, with little or no biological adaptation. Formal modelling of the transmission of language, using mathematical or computational techniques, allows rigorous study of the impact of these two modes of transmission on the structure of language. In this thesis, computational models are used to investigate the evolution of symbolic vocabulary and compositional structure. To what extent can these aspects of language be explained in terms of purely biological or cultural evolution? Should we expect to see a fruitful interaction between these two adaptive processes in a dual transmission model? As a first step towards addressing these questions, models which focus on the cultural transmission of language are developed. These models suggest that the symbolic vocabulary and compositional structure of language can emerge through the adaptation of language itself in response to pressure to be learnable. This pressure arises during cultural transmission as a result of 1) the inductive bias of learners and 2) the poverty of the stimulus available to learners. Language-like systems emerge only when learners acquire their linguistic competence on the basis of sparse input and do so using learning procedures which are biased in favour of one-to-one mappings between meanings and signals. Children acquire language under precisely such circumstances. As the second stage of inquiry, dual transmission models are developed to ascertain whether this cultural evolution of language interacts with the biological evolution of the language faculty. In these models an individual’s learning bias is assumed to be genetically determined. Surprisingly, natural selection during the genetic transmission of this innate endowment does not result in the development of learning biases which lead, through cultural processes, to language-like communication - there is no synergistic interaction between biological and cultural evolution. The evolution of language may therefore best be explained in terms of cultural evolution on a domain-general or exapted innate substrate.
30
Oesch, Nathaniel Tillman. "The adaptive significance of human language : function, form and social evolution". Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:134cde61-703b-4ff4-8ba0-a921fa287775.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Language is arguably one of the most salient features that distinguish humans from other animal species. However, despite the existence of a large body of relevant theoretical and empirical research, there is currently no consensus as to why language emerged exclusively in the human species or how it evolved its unique communicative structure. In this thesis, I therefore take a multi-pronged approach to analysing and testing several different hypotheses for the biological function and evolution of language. In Chapter I, I review the evidence and theoretical arguments for each of these proposals and provide, in place, a synthetic perspective which integrates or eliminates each of these ostensibly competing hypotheses for the biological function of language. In Chapter II, I employ the first experimental test of the interdependence hypothesis: the unique proposal offered to explain the emergence and potential coevolution of language and cooperation in the human species. In pursuit of this experiment, I employed a cooperative social foraging task using small and large groups to determine what factors enable individuals to make sense of information from others and converge upon a group consensus. In Chapter III, I take an experimental approach to determine whether aspects of human language can be characterised in terms of honest signalling theory. In this respect, I test several different proposals predicted by the sexual selection and deception hypotheses for human language function. In Chapter IV, I divert attention away from biological function to focus more closely on language structure. More specifically, I take an experimental approach to the problem of how and indeed whether recursive syntax evolved to be a consistent feature of human language. In pursuit of this experiment, I utilized the Imposing Memory Task (IMT) and a recursive syntax measure, to determine relative performance on each of these cognitive tasks, thereby testing whether recursive syntax may have evolved in tandem with higher-order intentionality (also known as embedded mindreading). Finally, in Chapter V, I discuss the results and implications of these experiments, and possible suggestions for future studies.
31
Whaley, Marika Lynn. "The evolution of the Slavic 'be(come)'-type compound future /". The Ohio State University, 2000. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1488203158825875.
Pełny tekst źródła
32
Morales, Montserrat. "Substitution, evolution et attitudes linguistiques le cas Valenciano-Catalan". Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/5226.
Pełny tekst źródła
33
Nakashima, Izumi. "Evolution of Humans Outside the Genome". Nagoya University School of Medicine, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2237/5405.
Pełny tekst źródła
34
Murray, Keelin Margaret. "Music, language and the signalling of cognitive ability : an empirical investigation". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/17899.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
First systematically discussed by Darwin (1871), theories of a musical precursor to language have seen a revival in recent years, with researchers such as Tecumseh Fitch, Stephen Brown, and Stephen Mithen invigorating the field. The view that language and music have an evolutionary relationship has been discussed in light of recent comparative, musicological, and biological findings. However, little empirical data have been presented to support such theories. This thesis aims to address this oversight, by presenting a novel experimental paradigm, which tests the prediction of a novel hypothesis for the evolution of language from a musical precursor. The aim of this thesis is to encourage discussion and provide a framework for the empirical investigation of music’s role in the evolution of language. As a first step to addressing this relative dearth of empirical research, a hypothesis is outlined which describes a stable system of signalling cognitive ability through the transmission of culturally-learned, complex, music-like sequences. This is not hypothesised to have been semantically meaningful, rather a system which supported the honest transmission of information about the abilities of potential allies. Such a learned sequential precursor (LSP) to language would require both increased cognitive capacity and an investment of time and energy in learning. These requirements ensured the honesty of signalling, and so perceivers of the LSP could use it as a reliable indicator of the cognitive ability of producers. This was a necessary stage in evolution, prior to protolanguage, in which individuals exhibited a complex learned, culturally-transmitted, music-like signalling system. Such a learned sequential precursor may have arisen through a pressure for the reliable indication of cognitive ability, brought about by environmental and social changes with the advent of Homo erectus. These social changes included a new urge to cooperate, and so this precursor is proposed to have emerged and developed through collaborative partner choice. Perceivers of the system used cues within the musical sequences in order to determine the quality of a producer as a collaborative partner. Empirical tests are presented, which support the hypothesised LSP. The first study tested the complexity aspect of the hypothesis, asking participants to rate complex and non-complex pieces of music according to how much they liked the piece, how familiar it sounded, how attractive and intelligent they found the person who created it, and how likely they were to choose to collaborate with this individual. It was found that complexity was preferred under all measures but one, that of familiarity. The second, main, study predicted that a correlation should be found between measures of cognitive ability that are relevant to musical learning (processing speed and intelligence) and measures of musical learning (ability to replicate and recall target pieces, and make creative pieces). This prediction was upheld, supporting the hypothesis that a learned sequential precursor could have acted as an honest signal of cognitive ability. No correlations were found between these abilities and a measure of physical quality, supporting the hypothesis that this system may have undergone social selection. The third study further tested the question of selection and choice, predicting that collaborative partner choice was key to the selection of this learned sequential precursor. Raters were asked to rate the sexual or collaborative ability of performers of pieces of music, based solely on their musical output. This study has yielded interesting tendencies, but no statistical support of the hypothesis that collaborative partner choice was more important than mate choice in this system. Taken together, these empirical studies support the hypothesis of a musical, learned sequential system of signalling cognitive ability. At the moment, the question of the selection of this precursor remains open, with hopes that further studies can address this question. The methodology used here draws together approaches from birdsong research, evolutionary psychology, and musicological research, in an attempt to prompt further interdisciplinary investigation into the role of music in the evolution of language.
35
Dickins, Thomas Edmund. "Signal to symbol : the first stage in the evolution of language". Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.323043.
Pełny tekst źródła
36
Loveday, Leo John. "The sociolinguistic evolution and synchronic dynamics of language contact in Japan". Thesis, University of Essex, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.236709.
Pełny tekst źródła
37
Kramer, Diane S. "XEM: XML Evolution Management". Digital WPI, 2001. https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/etd-theses/912.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
"As information on the World Wide Web continues to proliferate at an astounding rate, the Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been emerging as a standard format for data representation on the web. In many application domains, specific document type definitions (DTDs) are designed to enforce a semantically agreed-upon structure of the XML documents. In XML context, these structural definitions serve as schemata. However, both the data and the structure (schema) of XML documents tend to change over time for a multitude of reasons, including to correct design errors in the DTD, to allow expansion of the application scope over time, or to account for the merging of several businesses into one. Most of the current software tools that enable the use of XML do not provide explicit support for such data or schema changes. Using these tools in a changing environment entails making manual edits to DTDs and XML data and reloading them from scratch. In this vein, we put forth the first solution framework, called XML Evolution Manager (XEM), to manage the evolution of DTDs and XML documents. XEM provides a minimal yet complete taxonomy of basic change primitives. These primitives, classified as either data or schema changes, are consistency-preserving. For a data change, they ensure that the modified XML document conforms to its DTD both in structure and constraints. For a schema change, they ensure that the new DTD is well-formed, and all existing XML documents are transformed also to conform to the modified DTD. We prove both the completeness of our evolution taxonomy, as well as its consistency-preserving nature. To verify the feasibility of our XEM approach we have implemented a working prototype system in Java, using the XML4J parser from IBM and PSE Pro as our backend storage system. We present an experimental study run on this system where we compare the relative efficiencies of the primitive operations in terms of their execution times. We then contrast these execution times against the time to reload the data, which would be required in a manual system. Based on the results of these experiments we conclude that our approach improves upon the previous method of making manual changes and reloading data from scratch by providing automated evolution management facilities for DTDs and XML documents."
38
Brown, Jessica Erin. "Evolution of symbolic communication : an embodied perspective". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/7924.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
This thesis investigates the emergence in human evolution of communication through symbols, or conventional, arbitrary signs. Previous work has argued that symbolic speech was preceded by communication through nonarbitrary signs, but how vocal symbolic communication arose out of this has not been extensively studied. Thus far, past research has emphasized the advantages of vocal symbols and pointed to communicative and evolutionary pressures that would have spurred their development. Based on semiotic principles, I examine emergence in terms of two factors underlying symbols: interpretation and conventionalization. I address the question with a consideration of embodied human experience – that is, accounting for the particular features that characterize human communication. This involves simultaneous expression through vocal and gestural modalities, each of which has distinct semiotic properties and serves distinct functions in language today. I examine research on emerging sign systems together with research on properties of human communication to address the question of symbol emergence in terms of the specific context of human evolution. I argue that, instead of in response to pressures for improved communication, symbolic vocalizations could have emerged through blind cultural processes out of the conditions of multimodal nonarbitrary communication in place prior to modern language. Vocalizations would have been interpreted as arbitrary by virtue of their semiotic profile relative to that of gesture, and arbitrary vocalizations could have become conventionalized via the communicative support of nonarbitrary gestures. This scenario avoids appealing to improbable evolutionary and psychological processes and provides a comprehensive and evolutionarily sound explanation for symbol emergence. I present experiments that test hypotheses stemming from this claim. I show that novel arbitrary vocal forms are interpreted and adopted as symbols even when these are uninformative and gesture is the primary mode of communication. I also present computational models that simulate multi-channel, heterosemiotic communication like that of arbitrary speech and nonarbitrary gesture. These demonstrate that information like that provided by gesture can enable the conventionalization of symbols across a population. The results from experiments and simulations together support the claim that symbolic communication could arise naturally from multimodal nonarbitrary communication, offering an explanation for symbol emergence more consistent with evolutionary principles than existing proposals.
39
Hoefler, Stefan H. "Modelling the role of pragmatic plasticity in the evolution of linguistic communication". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/3283.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
For a long time, human language has been assumed to be genetically determined and therefore the product of biological evolution. It is only within the last decade that researchers have begun to investigate more closely the domaingeneral cognitive mechanisms of cultural evolution as an alternative explanation for the origins of language. Most of this more recent work focuses on the role of imperfect cultural transmission and abstracts away from the mechanisms of communication. Specifically, models developed to study the cultural evolution of language—both theoretical and computational—often tacitly assume that linguistic signals fully specify the meaning they communicate. They imply that ignoring the fact that this is not the case in actual language use is a justified idealisation which can be made without significant consequences. In this thesis, I show that by making this idealisation, we miss out on the extensive explanatory potential of an empirically attested property of language: its pragmatic plasticity. The meaning that a signal comes to communicate in a specific context usually differs to a certain degree from its conventional meaning. This thesis (i) introduces a model of the cultural evolution of language that acknowledges and incorporates the fact that communication exhibits pragmatic plasticity and (ii) explores the explanatory potential of this fact with regard to language evolution. The thesis falls into two parts. In the first part, I develop the model conceptually. I begin by analysing the components of extant models of general cultural evolution and discuss how models of language change and linguistic evolution map onto them. Innovative use is identified as the motor of cultural evolution. I then conceptualise the cognitive mechanisms underlying innovative language use and argue that they originate in pre-linguistic forms of ostensive-inferential communication. In a next step, the identified mechanisms are employed to provide a unified account of the two main explananda of evolutionary linguistics, the emergence of symbolism and the emergence of grammar. Finally, I discuss the implications of the presented analysis for the so-called proto-language debate. In the second part of the thesis, I propose a computational implementation of the developed conceptual model. This computational implementation allows for the simulation of the cultural emergence and evolution of symbolic communication and provides a laboratory-like environment to study individual aspects of this process. I employ such computer simulations to explore the role that pragmatic plasticity plays in the development of the expressivity, signal economy and ambiguity of emerging and evolving symbolic communication systems. As its main contribution to the study of language evolution, this thesis shows that a model of linguistic cultural evolution that incorporates the notion of pragmatic plasticity has the potential to explain two crucial evolutionary puzzles, namely (i) how language can emerge from no language, and (ii) how language can come to exhibit the appearance of design for communication. The proposed usage-based model of language evolution bridges the evolutionary gap between no language and language by identifying ostensive-inferential communication as the continual aspect present in both stages, and by demonstrating that the cognitive mechanisms involved in ostensive-inferential communication are sufficient for the transition from one stage to the other.
40
Roberts, Sean Geraint. "Evolutionary approach to bilingualism". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/7995.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
The ability to learn multiple languages simultaneously is a fundamental human linguistic capacity. Yet there has been little attempt to explain this in evolutionary terms. Perhaps one reason for this lack of attention is the idea that monolingualism is the default, most basic state and so needs to be explained before considering bilingualism. When thinking about bilingualism in this light, a paradox appears: Intuitively, learning two languages is harder than learning one, yet bilingualism is prevalent in the world. Previous explanations for linguistic diversity involve appeals to adaptation for group resistance to freeriders. However, the first statement of the paradox is a property of individuals, while the second part is a property of populations. This thesis shows that the properties of cultural transmission mean that the link between individual learning and population-level phenomena can be complex. A simple Bayesian model shows that just because learning one language is easier than two, it doesn't mean that monolingualism will be the most prevalent property of populations. Although this appears to resolve the paradox, by building models of bilingual language evolution the complexity of the problem is revealed. A bilingual is typically defined as an individual with "native-like control of two languages" (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 56), but how do we define a native speaker? How do we measure proficiency? How do we define a language? How can we draw boundaries between languages that are changing over large timescales and spoken by populations with dynamic structures? This thesis argues that there is no psychological reality to the concept of discrete, monolithic, static `languages' - they are epiphenomena that emerge from the way individuals use low-level linguistic features. Furthermore, dynamic social structures are what drives levels of bilingualism. This leads to a concrete definition of bilingualism: The amount of linguistic optionality that is conditioned on social variables. However, integrating continuous variation and dynamic social structures into existing top-down models is difficult because many make monolingual assumptions. Subsequently, introducing bilingualism into these models makes them qualitatively more complicated. The assumptions that are valid for studying the general processes of cultural transmission may not be suitable for asking questions about bilingualism. I present a bottom-up model that is specifically designed to address the bilingual paradox. In this model, individuals have a general learning mechanism that conditions linguistic variation on semantic variables and social variables such as the identity of the speaker. If speaker identity is an important conditioning factor, then `bilingualism' emerges. The mechanism required to learn one language in this model can also learn multiple languages. This suggests that the bilingual paradox derives from focussing on the wrong kind of question. Rather than having to explain the ability to learn multiple languages simultaneously as an adaptation, we should be asking how and why humans developed a flexible language learning mechanism. This argument coincides with a move in the field of bilingualism away from asking `how are monolinguals and bilinguals different?' to `how does the distribution of variation affect the way children learn?'. In this case, while studies of language evolution look at how learning biases affect linguistic variation, studies of bilingualism look at how linguistic variation affects learning biases. I suggest that the two fields have a lot to offer each other.
41
Jiménez, López María Dolores. "Gramar systems: a-formal-language-theoretic framework for linguistics and cultural evolution". Doctoral thesis, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/8785.
Pełny tekst źródła
42
Bowie, Jill. "Compositional versus holistic theories of language evolution : an interdisciplinary and experimental evaluation". Thesis, University of Reading, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.446200.
Pełny tekst źródła
43
Zimmermann, Théo. "Challenges in the collaborative evolution of a proof language and its ecosystem". Thesis, Université de Paris (2019-....), 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019UNIP7163.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Dans cette thèse, je présente l'application de méthodes et de connaissances en génie logiciel au développement, à la maintenance et à l'évolution de Coq —un assistant de preuve interactif basé sur la théorie des types— et de son écosystème de paquets. Coq est développé chez Inria depuis 1984, mais sa base d’utilisateurs n’a cessé de s’agrandir, ce qui suscite désormais une attention renforcée quant à sa maintenabilité et à la participation de contributeurs externes à son évolution et à celle de son écosystème de plugins et de bibliothèques.D'importants changements ont eu lieu ces dernières années dans les processus de développement de Coq, dont j'ai été à la fois un témoin et un acteur (adoption de GitHub en tant que plate-forme de développement, tout d'abord pour son mécanisme de pull request, puis pour son système de tickets, adoption de l'intégration continue, passage à des cycles de sortie de nouvelles versions plus courts, implication accrue de contributeurs externes dans les processus de développement et de maintenance open source). Les contributions de cette thèse incluent une description historique de ces changements, le raffinement des processus existants et la conception de nouveaux processus, la conception et la mise en œuvre de nouveaux outils facilitant l’application de ces processus, et la validation de ces changements par le biais d’évaluations empiriques rigoureuses.L'implication de contributeurs externes est également très utile au niveau de l'écosystème de paquets. Cette thèse contient en outre une analyse des méthodes de distribution de paquets et du problème spécifique de la maintenance à long terme des paquets ayant un seul responsableIn this thesis, I present the application of software engineering methods and knowledge to the development, maintenance, and evolution of Coq —an interactive proof assistant based on type theory— and its package ecosystem. Coq has been developed at Inria since 1984, but has only more recently seen a surge in its user base, which leads to much stronger concerns about its maintainability, and the involvement of external contributors in the evolution of both Coq, and its ecosystem of plugins and libraries.Recent years have seen important changes in the development processes of Coq, of which I have been a witness and an actor (adoption of GitHub as a development platform, first for its pull request mechanism, then for its bug tracker, adoption of continuous integration, switch to shorter release cycles, increased involvement of external contributors in the open source development and maintenance process). The contributions of this thesis include a historical description of these changes, the refinement of existing processes, and the design of new ones, the design and implementation of new tools to help the application of these processes, and the validation of these changes through rigorous empirical evaluation.Involving external contributors is also very useful at the level of the package ecosystem. This thesis additionally contains an analysis of package distribution methods, and a focus on the problem of the long-term maintenance of single-maintainer packages
44
McAloon, Patrick Owen Robert. "The Evolution of Institutional Definitions of Advanced Skills in Chinese Language Pedagogy". The Ohio State University, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1392908597.
Pełny tekst źródła
45
Malone, MaryLauren. "The Gestural Communication of Bonobos (Pan paniscus): Implications for the Evolution of Language". University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1384850953.
Pełny tekst źródła
46
Bökset, Roar. "Long Story of Short Forms : The Evolution of Simplified Chinese Characters". Doctoral thesis, Stockholm University, Department of Chinese Studies, 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-993.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
A script reform was carried out in China between 1955 and 1964 by simplifying the shape of a number of characters. Most of the simplified forms adopted had already been in popular use for a long time before this reform, while a few were invented for the occasion.
One objective of this dissertation is to estimate the proportion of invented forms. To this end, use of simplified variants before 1955 was surveyed. Pre-reform writing turned out to be more heterogeneous than expected. In fact, already Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) handwriting differed considerably from the norms set up by contemporary dictionaries and model texts.
One aim of the script reform was to unify writing habits and make them conform better with established norms. To evaluate the Script Reform Committee's success in this field, this dissertation surveys the use of different unofficial short forms even after the reform. Success turned out to be moderate. Many pre-1955 short variants survived, and, what was worse, new ones emerged after the reform. Particularly confusing was the use of different unofficial short forms in different parts of China. The existence of such local variants was confirmed by extensive reading of signs, advertisements, price tags and wall newspapers in twenty-one provinces, and by interviews with informants at four hundred localities. Results of that survey are displayed on twenty-four maps.
A few years earlier, even Japanese characters had gone through a reform which made many simplified forms official. Some of the new official Japanese forms differed from those which came to be official in China, creating a discrepancy which has at times been lamented. However, this dissertation compares the short forms used in pre-reform Japan with those of pre-reform China, and shows that most of the present discrepancies have roots in differences in Chinese and Japanese writing traditions, which bound the hands of reformers in both countries and enforced the decisions which were eventually made.
47
Kitiabi, Dianah B. "Second Language Acquisition in a Study Abroad Context: International Students' Perspectives of the Evolution of their `Second Language Self'". Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1525808048536783.
Pełny tekst źródła
48
D'Alonzo, Jacopo. "Trần Đức Thảo’s Theory of Language Origins". Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018USPCA096/document.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Depuis des siècles, plusieurs penseurs et scientifiques ont abordé la relation entre la coopération, le langage et la cognition sociale. Parmi eux, Trần Đức Thảo (1917-1993) mérite une mention spéciale. Le but de la recherche qui suit est de présenter au lecteur la réflexion philosophique de Thảo sur le langage humain et son évolution. Nous essaierons de tracer les grandes lignes de la théorie de Thảo sur les origines du langage dans ses Recherches sur l'origine du langage et de la conscience (1973) dans lesquelles il a essayé de trouver une synthèse entre philosophie, linguistique, psychologie et anthropologie physique. La découverte du marxisme-léninisme a conduit Thảo à proposer une approche matérialiste et dialectique au problème de la relation entre corps esprit. De cette façon, Thảo a proposé une sorte de tournant matérialiste et historique de la philosophie de la conscience de Husserl qui était au cœur de ses premiers intérêts philosophiques. La théorie de Thảo met en relief la nature sociale du langage et de la cognition, de sorte que l’évolution du langage est inextricablement liée aux relations sociales. Une telle conclusion reposait sur l’hypothèse que le travail est une caractéristique exclusivement humaine qui distingue les humains des animaux. Pour lui, la genèse du langage est dans le travail humain et donc le langage se développe parmi nos ancêtres pré-humains ainsi que chez les humains en réponse aux problèmes posés par la vie matérielle. En gardant à l’esprit que le langage découle des exigences sociales et des besoins du monde matériel, selon Thảo le langage se transforme lui-même au fur et à mesure que la société humaine change. Et compte tenu des racines sociales de la pensée et du langage, la conscience évolue continuellement avec le temps. Dans ce cadre, Thảo a voulu déterminer la nature du langage et son rôle dans les sociétés préhistoriques et son évolution à travers les relations socialesSeveral thinkers and scientists throughout the philosophical and scientific tradition took up the relationship between cooperation, language, and social cognition. Among them, Trần Đức Thảoʼs (1917–1993) deserves a special mention. The purpose of the following research is to introduce the reader to Thảoʼs philosophical reflection on human language and its evolution. We shall attempt to map out the main lines of Thảoʼs theory of language origins set out in his Recherches sur l’origine du langage et de la conscience (1973) that combines philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and anthropology. The discovery of Marxism-Leninism led Thảo to suggest a materialistic and dialectic approach to the mind-body problem. In this way, Thảo tried to suggest a materialist and historical turn of Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness which was at the very heart of his own first philosophical interests. Thảo’s account threw into sharp relief the social nature of both language and cognition, so that language evolution is linked inextricably to social relations. Such a view depended upon the assumption that labour is an exclusively human characteristic which sets humans apart from animals. And the genesis of language is in human labour. In this way of thinking, language develops among both our pre-human ancestors and present humans in response to problems posed by the material life. Bearing in mind that language arises from the social demands and needs of the material world, language is transformed itself as human society changes. And given the social roots of thought and language, consciousness evolves continuously over time. Within this framework, Thảo wanted to determine the nature of language and its role in pre-historical societies and its making through social relations
49
Palfi, Benike. "From demon to god : the evolution of the vampire in literature". Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/11162.
Pełny tekst źródłaStreszczenie:
Includes bibliographical references.Vampires may be centuries-old mythological creatures, but depictions thereof abound in our modern society in literature, film, and television. The prevalence of the vampire is related to its enormous symbolic power to reflect socio-cultural conditions of society at the time of its creation, which not only determines how the vampire figure has changed within modern literary history, but also makes it possible to pinpoint certain social conditions influencing this change. The aspects of religion and capitalism, and, directly associated with this, consumerism, emerge as particularly relevant when analysing the changes of the fictional vampire, as they are both effective measures of socio-cultural circumstances and have been associated with the vampire figure - in terms of its creation, nature, and specific characteristics - in the history of mythology and literature. It is through tracing the themes of religion and capitalism within primary vampire texts at key moments in history that a greater understanding of how and why the vampire figure has changed may be gained.
50
Nelson-Sathi, Shijulal [Verfasser]. "Network Modeling of Lateral Inheritance in Genome and Language Evolution / Shijulal Nelson-Sathi". Düsseldorf : Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 2013. http://d-nb.info/1037197992/34.
Pełny tekst źródła