The Emergence of Compositionality, Hierarchy and Recursion in Peer-to-peer Interactions

It is argued that compositionality, hierarchy and recursion, generally acknowledged to be universal features of human languages, can be explained as being emergent properties of the complex dynamics governing the establishment and evolution of a language in a population of language users, mainly on an intra-generational time scale, rather than being the result of a genetic selection process leading to a specialized language faculty that imposes those features upon language or than being mainly a cross-generational cultural phenomenon. This claim is supported with results from a computational language game experiment in which a number of autonomous software agents bootstrap a common compositional and recursive language.