Cover not available
Article published In:
Computational Construction Grammar and Constructional Change
Edited by Katrien Beuls and Remi van Trijp
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 30] 2016
► pp. 219–250

Modelling pronominal gender agreement in Dutch

From a syntactic to a semantic strategy

| Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium
| Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium

In the context of cultural evolution, we propose a multi-agent model that allows, through pair-wise interactions between homogeneous individuals of a population, to simulate the shift from a syntactic towards a semantic pronominal agreement system. We explore various gender mapping and learning mechanisms that can allow the agents to form a new agreement system using their semantic knowledge about the world. We investigate whether our strategies can yield cohesive clusterings over the semantic space. We notice that the system reaches full convergence in terms of gender preference at population level and that there are multiple successful ways of dividing the semantic space, including one that reflects the so-called individuation hierarchy, a case attested by a study of a spoken language data.

Published online: 10 January 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.30.10rad
References
Audring, Jenny
2006 “Pronominal gender in spoken Dutch.” Journal of Germanic Linguistics 18 (02): 85–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 “Gender assignment and gender agreement: Evidence from pronominal gender languages.” Morphology 18 (2): 93–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 Reinventing pronoun gender. Utrecht: LOT Dissertation Series.Google Scholar
Beuls, Katrien and Luc Steels
2013 “Agent-based models of strategies for the emergence and evolution of grammatical agreement.” PLOS ONE 8 (3): e58960. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beuls, Katrien, Luc Steels, and Sebastian Höfer
2012 “The Emergence of Internal Agreement Systems.” In Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution, ed. by Luc Steels, 233–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Charniak, Eugene and Micha Elsner
2009 “EM works for pronoun anaphora resolution.” In Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 148–156. Athens: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville G.
1979 “The agreement hierarchy.” Journal of linguistics 15 (02): 203–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006 “Gender, grammatical.” The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Elsevier: 749–756. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Vogelaer, Gunther
2009 “Changing pronominal gender in Dutch.” In Language Variation-European Perspectives II: Selected Papers from the 4th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 4), Nicosia, June 2007, ed. by Stavroula Tsiplakou, Marilena Karyolemou, and Pavlos Pavlou, Volume 21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Vogelaer, Gunther and Gert De Sutter
2011 “The geography of gender change: pronominal and adnominal gender in Flemish dialects of Dutch.” Language Sciences 33 (1): 192–205. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Vos, Lien
2008 “Pronominale hersemantisering in het Zuid-Nederlandse genussysteem.” Master's thesis, Universiteit Gent – Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte.Google Scholar
2013 “On variation in gender agreement: The neutralization of pronominal gender in Dutch.” Synchrony and Diachrony: A dynamic interface 1331: 237–260. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hurskainen, Arvi
2000 “Noun classification in African Languages.” In Gender in Grammar and Cognition, ed. by Barbara Unterbeck, Matti Rissanen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Mirja Saari, 665–688. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
2007 “Transmission and diffusion.” Language 831: 344–387. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lappin, Shalom and Herbert J Leass
1994 “An algorithm for pronominal anaphora resolution.” Computational linguistics 20 (4): 535–561.Google Scholar
Lenaerts, Tom, Bart Jansen, Karl Tuyls, and Bart De Vylder
2005 “The evolutionary language game: An orthogonal approach.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 235 (4): 566–582. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Loetzsch, Martin, Pieter Wellens, Joachim De Beule, Joris Bleys, and Remi Van Trijp
2008 “The babel2 manual.” Technical report, Tech. Rep. AI-Memo 01–08, AI-Lab VUB, Brussels.Google Scholar
Loreto, Vittorio and Luc Steels
2007 “Social dynamics: Emergence of language.” Nature Physics 3 (11): 758–760. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Manning, Christopher D., Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schiitze
2008 Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oliphant, Michael
1997 Formal Approaches to Innate and Learned Communication: Laying the Foundation for Language. Ph. D. thesis, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
Pijpops, Dirk, Katrien Beuls, and Freek Van de Velde
2015 “The rise of the verbal weak inflection in Germanic: An agent-based model.” Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Journal 51: 81–102.Google Scholar
Sasse, Hans-Jurgen
1993 “Syntactic Categories and Subcategories.” In Syntax. An international handbook of contemporary research., ed. by Joachim Jacobs, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld, and Theo Vennemann, 646–686. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Semplicini, Chiara
2012 “Dutch Double Gender Nouns: Arbitrary or Motivated Agreement?.” Journal of Germanic Linguistics 24 (02): 133–186. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siemund, Peter
2008 Pronominal gender in English: A study of English varieties from a cross-linguistic perspective. Routledge.Google Scholar
Steels, Luc
2001 “Language games for autonomous robots.” IEEE Intelligent systems 161: 16–22.Google Scholar
2011 “Introducing Fluid Construction Grammar.” In Design patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar, ed. by Luc Steels, 3–30. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steels, Luc and Frederic Kaplan
1999 “Collective learning and semiotic dynamics.” In Advances in artificial life, ed. by Dario Floreano, Jean-Daniel Nicoud, and Francesco Mondada, 679–688. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steels, Luc and Martin Loetzsch
2010 “Babel: A Tool for Running Experiments on the Evolution of Language.” In Evolution of Communication and Language in Embodied Agents, ed. by S Nolfi and M Mirolli, 307–313. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 “The Grounded Naming Game.” In Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution, ed. by Luc Steels, 41–59. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steels, Luc and Paul Vogt
1997 “Grounding Adaptive Language Games in Robotic Agents.” In Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life, 474–482. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Taeldeman, Johan
2001 “De regenboog van de Vlaamse dialecten..” In Het taallandschap in Vlaanderen, ed. by Johan De Caluwe, Magdalena Devos, and Johan Taeldeman, 49–58. Academia Press.Google Scholar
Van de Velde, Freek
2011 De nominale constituent: Structuur en geschiedenis. Leuven: Leuven University Press.Google Scholar
Wellens, Pieter
2012 Adaptive Strategies in the Emergence of Lexical Systems. Doctoral dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Brussel – Faculteit Wetenschappen.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Fedden, Sebastian & Greville G. Corbett
2018. Extreme classification. Cognitive Linguistics 29:4 ► pp. 633 ff. DOI logo
Van Eecke, Paul, Katrien Beuls, Jérôme Botoko Ekila & Roxana Rădulescu
2022. Language games meet multi-agent reinforcement learning: A case study for the naming game. Journal of Language Evolution 7:2 ► pp. 213 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.