从信号博弈初探社会因素与语言结构的关联

Social Factors and Language Structure:A View from Signaling Game

在哲学、社会语言学和认知语言学中,社会因素与语言结构的关联一直是被关注的问题。许多语言之外的因素被证明在语言结构及其性质中扮演了重要的角色。例如:社会环境和社会生态因素等。但是大部分在这一领域的结果都还是通过田野调查和实验方法获得的。本文将通过构建数学模型特别是博弈论模型来探究有哪些社会因素影响及如何影响语言结构的性质。本文集中讨论的社会因素包括:社会经验知识、语言使用成本以及社会人员组成。通过对刘易斯信号博弈模型的静态和动态的扩展,讨论以上社会因素如何与交流者的语言复杂度偏好相关联。

The correlations between social factors and language structure have been studied in social linguistics,philosophy,psycholinguistics.Various extralinguistic factors have been shown to play a role in some aspects of the language structure,such as the ecological risk and social environment.Most of those works are done in the field works and empirical studies.In this paper,we try to explore the correlations between morphological complexity in language and social factors through the mathematical models,especially game theory.We apply both the static and dynamic Lewis’s style signaling game to incorporate various social factors,including background social knowledge,costs of using language and population proportions.The connections between those social factors and the interlocutors’preferences of using a complex and a simpler expression are established.