The Emergence of Morphosyntactic Case Systems

Abstract

Despite centuries of research, the origins of grammatical case are more mysterious than ever. This paper addresses some unanswered questions through language game experiments in which a multi-agent population self-organizes a morphosyntactic case system. The experiments show how the formal part of grammatical constructions may pressure such emergent systems to become more economical.

Published/Presented: World Scientific
Page: 360–368