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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

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A case of cultural evolution

The emergence of morphological case

 | Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 17 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.32.08les
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.
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Lestrade, Sander & Zhiqiang Cai
2017. Unzipping Zipf’s law. PLOS ONE 12:8 ► pp. e0181987 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2017. , DOI logo

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