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The evolutionary dynamics of how languages signal who does what to whom.

ABSTRACT: Languages vary in how they signal "who does what to whom". Three main strategies to indicate the participant roles of "who" and "whom" are case, verbal indexing, and rigid word order. Languages that disambiguate these roles with case tend to have either verb-final or flexible word order. Most previous studies that found these patterns used limited language samples and overlooked the causal mechanisms that could jointly explain the association between all three features. Here we analyze grammatical data from a Grambank sample of 1705 languages with phylogenetic causal graph methods. Our results corroborate the claims that verb-final word order generally gives rise to case and, strikingly, establish that case tends to lead to the development of flexible word order. The combination of novel statistical methods and the Grambank database provides a model for the rigorous testing of causal claims about the factors that shape patterns of linguistic diversity.

SUBMITTER: Shcherbakova O

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10973346 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The evolutionary dynamics of how languages signal who does what to whom.

Shcherbakova Olena O Blasi Damián E DE Gast Volker V Skirgård Hedvig H Gray Russell D RD Greenhill Simon J SJ

Scientific reports 20240327 1

Languages vary in how they signal "who does what to whom". Three main strategies to indicate the participant roles of "who" and "whom" are case, verbal indexing, and rigid word order. Languages that disambiguate these roles with case tend to have either verb-final or flexible word order. Most previous studies that found these patterns used limited language samples and overlooked the causal mechanisms that could jointly explain the association between all three features. Here we analyze grammatic ...[more]

PMID: 38538665

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Project description:Models of evolution of simple languages have typically assumed full alignment of the speaker and listeners interests, with perfect understanding representing the optimal outcome for both parties. In more realistic settings, communicating individuals will often desire different outcomes from one another. Previous work has shown that misalignment of speaker-listener interests reduces the maximum informativeness among Nash-equilibrium languages, and that multiple equilibrium languages (with different degrees of informativeness) are supported. We study the stochastic evolutionary dynamics of signaling games in which the alignment of speaker-listener interests can vary. We find that increased misalignment of speaker-listener interests is associated with a decrease in information transmission. Moreover, the most common languages to evolve are typically the most informative languages supportable as static Nash equilibria, suggesting a solution to the ‘equilibrium selection problem’. In addition, our dynamics reveal the mechanism by which less informative languages evolve: words that previously signaled intense states come to be used hyperbolically for less intense states, with listeners’ interpretation of these newly-ambiguous words evolving downward in response. We ground our results in linguistic data on intensifiers such as so and very, words which have unique dynamics—with constant recycling and innovation that match our theoretical results well. Author summary Analyses of signaling and language have typically assumed that both speakers and listeners have a common interest, such as to communicate the location of predators or resources or to convey precise instructions on how to perform a particular task. However, Nature is also rife with situations where mutual interest cannot be assumed. Many such situations have gradated states, signals, and actions, where speaker and listener desire different actions in conjunction with different true states, which are only known to the speaker. For instance, baby birds regularly overstate their true hunger level to their mother, due to a drive to obtain more than the base requirements in attention and nutrients; there are countless parallels in the context of human communication. Previous works in static game theory have established interesting results in modeling misaligned talk, such as the presence of multiple equilibria and the rapid shrinkage of lexica as misalignment of interest increases. Here we expand both the static theory, but also show using evolutionary game theory which equilibria are selected and why. We make a strong connection to linguistics via intensifiers—words such as “so”, “really”, and “very”—which suggests this literature may be immediately salient to sociolinguistics and other disciplines.

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The evolutionary dynamics of how languages signal who does what to whom.

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The evolutionary dynamics of how languages signal who does what to whom.

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