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date: 18 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

The productivity of language is subserved by two structural properties: language is recursive, which allows the creation of an infinite number of utterances, and language is compositional, which makes the interpretation of novel utterances possible. A potential explanation for the linkage between the functional properties of compositionality and the compositional structure of language is that this fit arose through cultural, rather than biological, evolution. In order to argue that the compositional structure of language is a product of cultural evolution, it is assumed that language is compositional, socially learned, and therefore culturally transmitted. A well-established solution to the problem of linkage in biological systems is that of evolution by natural selection: adaptation. Compositionality can be explained as a cultural adaptation by language to the problem of transmission through a learning bottleneck.

Keywords: cultural adaptation, compositionality, natural selection, heritable variation, compositional structure

Kenny Smith

Kenny Smith is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, with interests in the evolution of communication, human language, and the human capacity for language.

Simon Kirby

Simon Kirby is Professor of Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh and co‐founder of the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit. He has pioneered the application of computational and mathematical modelling techniques to traditional issues in language acquisition, change, and evolution. In particular, he has developed an experimental and computational approach to cultural evolution called Iterated Learning, which treats language as a complex adaptive system operating on multiple interacting time‐scales.

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