The Emergence of Internal Agreement Systems

Grammatical agreement means that two linguistic units share certain syntactic or semantic features such as gender, number or person. Agreement has a variety of grammatical functions. One of them, called internal agreement, is to signal which wordsare grouped together as part of the same phrase. This chapter explores how a population might self-organize suchan agreement system. We argue that this happens when speakers attempt to reduce processing effort and avoid ambiguities.

ISBN:978-90-272-0456-1

Keywords:Grammatical Agreement, Language games, Multi-agent learning, Emergence, Origins of Language