Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lund University, Dept. of Philosophy. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-276) and index.

In addition to individual learning mechanisms, the thesis further explores the effects of cultural transmission, social and semantic structures on language evolution. First, it simulates some major forms of cultural transmission, and discusses the role of conventionalization during horizontal transmission in language evolution. Second, it traces the emergence and maintenance of language in some stable social structures, and explores the role of popular agents in language evolution, the relationship between mutual understanding and social hierarchy, and the effect of exoteric communications on the convergence of communal languages. Finally, it studies language maintenance given different semantic spaces, and illustrates that the semantic structure may cause bias in the constituent word order, which can help to predict the word order bias in human languages. These explorations examine the role of self-organization in language evolution, provide some reconsideration on the bottleneck effect during cultural transmission, and shed light on the study of the social structure effects on language evolution. / The thesis presents a multi-agent computational model to explore a key question in language emergence, i.e., whether syntactic abilities result from innate, species-specific competences, or they evolve from domain-general abilities through gradual adaptations. The model simulates a process of coevolutionary emergence of two linguistic universals (compositionality, in the form of lexical items; and regularity, in the form of constitute word orders) in human language, i.e., the acquisition and conventionalization of these features coevolve during the transition from a holistic signaling system to a compositional language. It also traces a "bottom-up" process of syntactic development, i.e., agents, by reiterating local orders between two lexical items, can gradually form global order(s) to regulate multiple lexical items in sentences. These results suggest that compositionality, regularity, and correlated linguistic abilities could have emerged as a result of some domain-general abilities, such as pattern extraction and sequential learning. / Gong, Tao. / "May 2007." / Adviser: William S-Y. Wang. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-01, Section: A, page: 0200. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 317-346). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, August, 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

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Contemporary transnational literature presents a unique interpretive problem, due to new methods of language and culture negotiation in the information age. The resulting condition, transnational compositionality, is evidenced by specific linguistic artifacts; to illustrate this I use three American novels as a case study: Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. By extension, many conventional literary elements are changed in the transnational since modernity: satire is no longer a lampooning of cultures but a questioning of the methods by which humans blend cultures together; similarly, complex symbolic constructions may no longer be taken at face value, for they now communicate more about cultural identity processes than static ideologies. If scholars are to achieve adequate interpretations of these elements, we must consider the global framework that has so intimately shaped them in the twenty-first century.