Steels, LucGarcia Casademont, Emília, 1987-2016-02-012016-03-012015Steels L, Garcia Casademont E. Ambiguity and the origins of syntax. The Linguistic Review. 2015;32(1):37-60. DOI: 10.1515/tlr-2014-00210167-6318http://hdl.handle.net/10230/25706The paper argues that syntax is motivated by the need to avoid combinatorial search in parsing and semantic ambiguity in interpretation. It reports on a case study for the emergence and sharing of first-order phrase structures in a population of agents playing language games. First-order phrase structures combine words into phrases but do not yet generalise to hierarchical or recursive phrases. To study why human languages exhibit phrase structure, a series of strategies for creating and sharing linguistic conventions are examined, starting from a lexical strategy without syntax and then studying the use of groups, n-grams and patterns. Each time we show in which way a strategy improves on the computational complexity of the previous on.application/pdfeng© De Gruyter Published version available at http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/tlir.2015.32.issue-1/tlr-2014-0021/tlr-2014-0021.xml?rskey=HD869b&result=1Gramàtica comparada i general SintaxiSemiòticainfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2014-0021Origins of syntaxLanguage gamesLanguage strategiesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess