Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T00:34:28.707Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Toward the Emergence of Nontrivial Compositionality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Shane Steinert-Threlkeld
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

All natural languages exhibit a distinction between content words (nouns, verbs, etc.) and function words (determiners, auxiliaries, tenses, etc.). Yet surprisingly little has been said about the emergence of this universal architectural feature of human language. This article argues that the existence of this distinction requires the presence of nontrivial compositionality and identifies assumptions that have previously been made in the literature that provably guarantee only trivial composition. It then presents a signaling game with variable contexts and shows how the distinction can emerge via reinforcement learning.

Type
Formal Epistemology and Game Theory
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 87 , Issue 5: PSA 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II Symposia Papers , December 2020 , pp. 897 - 909
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

Thanks to Jeff Barrett, Emmanuel Chemla, Meica Magnani, Iris van de Pol, and Jakub Szymanik, as well as the audience at the Symposium on Evolutionary Models of Compositional Communication at PSA 2018 and an anonymous referee for this journal for helpful comments and discussion. The author has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC grant STG 716230 CoSaQ.

References

Barrett, J. A. 2007. “Dynamic Partitioning and the Conventionality of Kinds.” Philosophy of Science 74:527–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, J. A.. 2009. “The Evolution of Coding in Signaling Games.” Theory and Decision 67 (2): 223–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, J. A., Skyrms, B., and Cochran, C.. 2020. “On the Evolution of Compositional Language.” Philosophy of Science, in this issue.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berthet, M., Mesbahi, G., Pajot, A., Cäsar, C., Neumann, C., and Zuberbühler, K.. 2018. “Titi Monkey Alarm Sequences: When Combining Creates Meaning.” Presented at the 26th Philosophy of Science Association Biennial Meeting, Seattle.Google Scholar
Carnie, A. 2006. Syntax: A Generative Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Carroll, L. 1871. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Cäsar, C., Zuberbühler, K., Young, R. J., and Byrne, R. W.. 2013. “Titi Monkey Call Sequences Vary with Predator Location and Type.” Biology Letters 9 (20130535): 2–5.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frege, G. 1923. “Logische Untersuchungen.” Pt. 3, “Gedankengefüge” [Compound thoughts]. Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 3:36–51.Google Scholar
Janssen, T. M. V. 1997. “Compositionality.” In Handbook of Logic and Language, ed. Benthem, J. van and Meulen, A. ter, 417–73. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Kennedy, C. 2007. “Vagueness and Grammar: The Semantics of Relative and Absolute Gradable Adjectives.” Linguistics and Philosophy 30:1–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, C., and McNally, L.. 2005. “Scale Structure, Degree Modification, and the Semantics of Gradable Predicates.” Language 81 (2): 345–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, D. 1969. Convention. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lewis, D.. 1988. “Relevant Implication.” Theoria 54 (3): 161–74.Google Scholar
Mnih, V., Heess, N., Graves, A., and Kavukcuoglu, K.. 2014. “Recurrent Models of Visual Attention.” arXiv.org, Cornell Univeristy. https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.6247.Google Scholar
Mordatch, I., and Abbeel, P.. 2018. “Emergence of Grounded Compositional Language in Multi-Agent Populations.” In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Palo Alto, CA: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.Google Scholar
Muysken, P. 2008. Functional Categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nothdurft, H. C. 1993. “Saliency Effects across Dimensions in Visual Search.” Vision Research 33 (5–6): 839–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nothdurft, H. C.. 2000. “Salience from Feature Contrast: Additivity across Dimensions.” Vision Research 40 (10–12): 1183–201.Google ScholarPubMed
Nowak, M. A., and Krakauer, D. C.. 1999. “The Evolution of Language.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96:8028–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ouattara, K., Lemasson, A., and Zuberbühler, K.. 2009. “Campbell’s Monkeys Concatenate Vocalizations into Context-Specific Call Sequences.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (51): 22026–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pagin, P., and Westerståhl, D.. 2010a. “Compositionality I: Definitions and Variants.” Philosophy Compass 5 (3): 250–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pagin, P., and Westerståhl, D.. 2010b. “Compositionality II: Arguments and Problems.” Philosophy Compass 5 (3): 265–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Partee, B. H. 1995. “Lexical Semantics and Compositionality.” In Invitation to Cognitive Science, pt. 1, Language, ed. Gleitman, L. and Liberman, M., 311–60. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L., and Cinque, G.. 2016. “Functional Categories and Syntactic Theory.” Annual Review of Linguistics 2 (1): 139–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlenker, P., Chemla, E., Arnold, K., Lemasson, A., Ouattara, K., Keenan, S., Stephan, C., Ryder, R., and Zuberbühler, K.. 2014. “Monkey Semantics: Two ‘dialects’ of Campbell’s Monkey Alarm Calls.” Linguistics and Philosophy 37:439–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlenker, P., Chemla, E., Schel, A. M., Fuller, J., Gautier, J.-P., Kuhn, J., Veselinović, D., Arnold, K., Cäsar, C., Keenan, S., Lemasson, A., Ouattara, K., Ryder, R., and Zuberbühler, K.. 2016a. “Formal Monkey Linguistics.” Theoretical Linguistics 42 (1–2): 1–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlenker, P., Chemla, E., Schel, A. M., Fuller, J., Gautier, J.-P., Kuhn, J., Veselinović, D., Arnold, K., Cäsar, C., Keenan, S., Lemasson, A., Ouattara, K., Ryder, R., and Zuberbühler, K.. 2016b. “Formal Monkey Linguistics: The Debate.” Theoretical Linguistics 42 (1–2): 173–201.Google Scholar
Skyrms, B. 2010. Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steinert-Threlkeld, S. 2014. “Learning to Use Function Words in Signaling Games.” In “Proceedings of Information Dynamics in Artificial Societies (IDAS-14),” ed. E. Lorini and L. Perrussel, special issue of Journal of Logic, Language and Information 25 (3–4).Google Scholar
Steinert-Threlkeld, S.. 2016a. “Compositional Signaling in a Complex World.” Journal of Logic, Language and Information 25 (3): 379–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steinert-Threlkeld, S.. 2016b. “Compositionality and Competition in Monkey Alert Calls.” Theoretical Linguistics 42 (1–2): 159–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutton, R. S., and Barto, A. G.. 2018. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Theeuwes, J. 1992. “Perceptual Selectivity for Color and Form.” Perception and Psychophysics 51 (6): 599–606.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Williams, R. J. 1992. “Simple Statistical Gradient-Following Algorithms for Connectionist Reinforcement Learning.” Machine Learning 8 (3–4): 229–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Xu, K., Ba, J., Kiros, R., Cho, K., Courville, A., Salakhutdinov, R., Zemel, R., and Bengio, Y.. 2015. “Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention.” In Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on International Conference on Machine Learning, ed. Bach, F. and Blei, D., 2048–57. New York: Association for Computing Machinery.Google Scholar
Zuberbühler, K. 2018. “Combinatorial Capacities in Primates.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 21:161–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar