In “The Devil's Dictionary”, Bierce (1911) defined language as “The music with which we
charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.” This satirical definition reflects a core truth …

The field of linguistics concerns itself with understanding the human capacity for language.
Compositionality is a key notion in this research tradition. Compositionality refers to the …

Many domains of inquiry in psychology are concerned with rich and complex phenomena. At
the same time, the field of psychology is grappling with how to improve research practices to …

Human cognition occurs within social contexts, and nowhere is this more evident than
language behavior. Regularly using multiple languages is a globally ubiquitous individual …

As proposed for the emergence of modern languages, we argue that modern uses of
languages (pragmatics) also evolved gradually in our species under the effects of human …

Language is the primary repository and mediator of human collective knowledge. A central
question for evolutionary linguistics is the origin of the combinatorial structure of language …

The distribution of word order across languages is skewed with SOV order (eg, researchers
sentences write) and SVO order (eg, researchers write sentences) being> 100 times more …

This paper proposes a Complexity Covariance Hypothesis, whereby linguistic complexity
covaries with cultural and socio-political complexity, and argues for an Evolutionary …

Experimental semiotics (ES) investigates how novel semiotic systems emerge by observing
people ground communication in lab games, thus exposing the fundamental principles of …

Construction grammar is an approach to language that posits that units and structures in
language can be exhaustively described as pairings between form and meaning. These …