L’origine et l’évolution du langage

Abstract

How can we explain the appearance, the evolution and the diversity of languages in human societies? To address these questions Luc Steels supports the hypothesis of an analogy between the mechanisms of language evolution and those of biological evolution: namely processes of replication / transmission, mutation and selection, to which are added prioritization processes at different levels of organization. After showing examples of the intervention of such processes in languages, Luc Steels explains the methods emerging from Artificial Intelligence and robotics which allow him to test his hypothesis through various experiments. In these experiments he first shows how Artificial Intelligences, interacting with one other, brings out a common vocabulary, and a common meaning given to each word of this vocabulary. And beyond that, still through such interactions, he shows how can emerge and why, there can also be emergence of elementary grammatical structures such as number or gender agreements or even more complex structures such as sentence nests. To conclude, he reasserts the idea that languages are permanently changing cultural systems, under the effect of dynamics of a nature similar to those at work in the evolution of species, while acknowledging that this idea is far from winning unanimous support.