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Abstract

Case languages use an inflectional category system for marking event structure. The research in this thesis investigates how such a grammatical system can be developed as the consequence of distributed processes whereby language users continuously shape and reshape their language in locally situated communicative interactions. Since these processes are notoriously difficult to grasp in natural languages, this thesis offers additional evidence from computational simulations in which autonomous artificial agents self-organise a case-like grammar with similar properties as found in case languages such as German, Latin and Turkish.

This thesis hypothesises that language users gradually build their grammar in order to optimise their communicative success and expressiveness while at the same time reducing the cognitive effort needed for semantic interpretation. In the experiments, artificial agents engage in a series of `language games' in which the speaker has to describe a dynamic event to the hearer. The agents are equipped with diagnostics for autonomously detecting communicative problems, repair strategies for solving these problems, and alignment strategies for coordinating their linguistic inventories with each other. Through comparative simulations, this thesis aims at demonstrating which communicative and external pressures and which cognitive mechanisms are minimally required for the formation of a case grammar.

Two innovating experiments are reported. The first experiment offers the first multi-agent simulations ever that involve polysemous categories. The agents are capable of inventing grammatical markers for indicating event structure and of generalising these markers to semantic roles by performing analogical reasoning over events. Extension by analogy occurs as a side-effect of the need to optimise communicative success and is accompanied by careful abstraction, which yields an increased productivity of the categories. In the second experiment, the agents are capable of combining markers into larger argument structure constructions through pattern formation. The results show that languages become unsystematic if the linguistic inventory is unstructured and contains multiple levels of organisation. This thesis demonstrates that this problem of systematicity can be solved using multi-level selection.

All the experiments are implemented in Fluid Construction Grammar. This thesis presents the first computational formalisation of argument structure in a construction-based approach that works for both production and parsing. It implements the `fusion' of the participant roles of events with the semantic roles of argument structure constructions. This representation aims at maximal fluidity and introduces some novel concepts in linguistics. Instead of containing a fixed predicate frame, verbs list their `potential valents' from which the `actual valency' is selected by argument structure constructions.

Even though the experiments involve the formation of artificial languages, the results are highly relevant for natural language research as well. This thesis therefore engages in an interdisciplinary dialogue with linguistics and contributes to some currently ongoing debates such as the formalisation of argument structure in construction grammar, the organisation of the linguistic inventory, the status of semantic maps and thematic hierarchies and the mechanisms for explaining grammaticalization.

@phdthesis{vantrijp08phdAnalogy,
  author={Remi van Trijp},
  title={Analogy and Multi-Level Selection in the Formation of a Case Grammar. A Case Study in Fluid Construction Grammar},
  year={2008},
  address={Antwerpen},
  school={Universiteit Antwerpen},
  url={http://groups.lis.illinois.edu/amag/langev/paper/vantrijp08phdAnalogy.html}
}

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