This article introduces an evolutionary modeling framework that integrates formal semantics by allowing lexical meanings and composition functions to co-evolve under pressures for conceptual simplicity and communicative accuracy.
- The framework is applied to the evolution of quantificational meaning.
- Analysis of the Pareto frontier reveals that conservativity emerges as an efficient system-wide abstraction.
- The account is sensitive to syntactic structure and reconciles tensions between empirical evidence on quantifier learnability and prior evolutionary models.
- Results demonstrate that sentential meaning in formal semantics can be productively combined with evolutionary modeling.
The findings provide a template for studying universals involving global compression within grammatical categories, semantic specialization of syntactic arguments, and the co-evolution of lexical and compositional meaning.