On the Emergence of Structured Expressions in Signaling Games

Natural languages exhibit a number of pervasive properties such as compositionality, vagueness, and ambiguity. Their cross-linguistic spread and diachronic stability is often argued to be explained, amongst others, in enabling productivity, flexibility and domain-independence, as well as lower grammar complexity -- facilitating a language's transmission across generations. In short; they make languages easier to learn while maintaining expressivity and adaptiveness. However, appeal to such advantages does not explain how these features emerged in the first place. A possible framework to address questions as this is given by Lewisian signaling games coupled with adaptive dynamics, where (linguistic) conventions arise through simple (communicative) interactions. In this talk, I will discuss recent work on the emergence of productive composition. The focus will lay on (i) a brief and gentle introduction to the topic, in particular to signaling games, and (ii) ongoing work on the emergence of modifier-head construction-like signals in (really) small multidimensional spaces.