The Emergence of Meta Communicative Interaction: some theory, some practice

摘要

A central concern of work on the evolution of language has been to offer an account for the emergence of syntactically complex structure, which underwrites a compositional semantics. In this paper we consider the emergence of one class of utterances which illustrate that semantic expressiveness is not correlated with syntactic complexity, namely meta communicative interaction (MCI). These are utterance acts in which conversationalists acknowledge understanding or request clarification. We offer a simple characterization of the incremental change required for MCI to emerge from an MCI-less linguistic interaction system. We discuss the evolutionary background in which MCI might arise and become adaptive. We describe a system in which computational simulations can be run designed to test hypotheses regarding the emergence of MCI.