The Two-Stage Life Cycle of Cultural Replicators

Abstract

Linguistics is the study of two separate but related phenomena, human languages and our unique ability to speak them. This unique ability, often referred to as the Language Faculty (LF), is a biologically determined adaptation that is essentially universal among humans. We do not know the exact sequence of historic stages this faculty went through during its evolution, or exactly what selection pressures it evolved in response to, and it has been argued that due to a lack of data, we never will (Fitch et al. 2005). But thanks to work in molecular biology over the last 150 years, we now have a fairly good understanding of the genetic mechanisms underlying its evolution, and are beginning to identify gene sequences and pathways directly related to it (Lai et al. 2001; Dediu & Ladd 2007).

On the replicator dynamics of lexical stress: accounting for stress-pattern diversity in terms of evolutionary game theory

“…On the other hand, item based replicator models have been developed less frequently, although the concept of linguistic replicators or "linguemes" (Croft 2000) has gained currency during the last two decades (see also Ritt 2004, Jäger & Rosenbach 2008, Baxter et al 2009, McCrohon 2012 In short, the methods employed in our study are well established in linguistic research, but have so far not been applied to the specific problem we discuss here. In the following, we briefly introduce EGT (4.1), and describe the specific game we have developed (4.2).…”

“…Item-based replicator models, on the other hand, have been developed less frequently, although the concept of linguistic replicators, or 'linguemes' (Croft 2000), has gained currency during the last two decades (see also Ritt 2004, Jäger & Rosenbach 2008, Baxter et al 2009, McCrohon 2012). An example of an item-based model is that of Jäger (2008), who investigates the dynamics of phonemes in the vowel space.…”