- Author
- Year
- 2012
- Title
- The Emergence of Quantifiers
- Book title
- Experiments in cultural language evolution
- Pages (from-to)
- 277-304
- Publisher
- Amsterdam: John Benjamins
- ISBN
- 9789027204561
- Serie
- Advances in interaction studies
- Volume | Edition (Serie)
- 3
- Document type
- Chapter
- Faculty
- Interfacultary Research Institutes
- Institute
- Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
- Abstract
-
Human natural languages use quantifiers as ways to designate the number of objects of a set. They include numerals, such as "three", or circumscriptions, such as "a few". The latter are not only underdetermined but also context dependent. We provide a cultural-evolution explanation for the emergence of such quantifiers, focusing in particular on the role of environmental constraints on strategy choices. Through a series of situated interaction experiments, we show how a community of robotic agents can self-organize a quantification system. Different perceptions of the scene make underdetermined quantifiers useful and environments in which the distribution of objects exhibits some degree of predictability creates favorable conditions for context-dependent quantifiers.
- Language
- English
- Permalink
- http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.370734
Disclaimer/Complaints regulations
If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library, or send a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.