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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2015
Edited by Björn Köhnlein and Jenny Audring
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 32] 2015
► pp. 105–115

A case of cultural evolution

The emergence of morphological case

 | Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
Morphological case is a cross-linguistically widespread strategy to mark the role of participants of an event. Using a computer simulation, this paper will show how case can emerge in languages that have no rules of grammar as a result of cultural evolution. For this, only very general cognitive and communicative principles are necessary.
Keywords: cultural evolution, argument marking, morphological case, computer simulation
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 17 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.32.08les
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