The complex adaptive systems view of language sees linguistic structure aris-ing via the interaction of three dynamical systems operating over different time-scales; biological evolution over the life-time of the species, cultural evolutionover the life-time of the language, and individual learning over the life-time of thespeaker (Kirby & Hurford, 2002). The outcome is the cultural adaptation of lan-guage to the different constraints imposed upon it by transmission (Kirby, Smith,& Cornish, 2007). These constraints can take a variety of forms, but the effectis largely similar; language adapts to become more easily learnable and transmit-table by our brains rather than the other way around.
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