Abstract
We provide a computational model of semantic alignment among communicating agents constrained by social and cognitive pressures. We use our model to analyze the effects of social stratification and a local transmission bottleneck on the coordination of meaning in isolated dyads. The analysis suggests that the traditional approach to learning-understood as inferring prescribed meaning from observations-can be viewed as a special case of semantic alignment, manifesting itself in the behaviour of socially imbalanced dyads put under mild pressure of a local transmission bottleneck. Other parametrizations of the model yield different long-term effects, including lack of convergence or convergence on simple meanings only.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Journal of Logic, Language and Information |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Pages (from-to) | 225-253 |
| Number of pages | 29 |
| ISSN | 0925-8531 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Bibliographical note
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Keywords
- Semantic alignment
- Coordination
- Social influence
- Cognitive constraints
- Transmission bottleneck
- Quantifiers