Shane Steinert-Threlkeld (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Natural language expressions fall into two categories: content and function words. While function words are essential to compositional semantics, surprisingly little has been said about their emergence. In this paper, I will show that most extant approaches to the emergence of compositional signaling fail to account for the emergence of functional vocabulary. After suggesting some conceptual reasons for this situation, I will present a model and simulation results exhibiting conditions under which such vocabulary can emerge from simple dynamics. This model captures the intuition that function words help aid communication with a limited vocabulary in the presence of contextual variability.
