Agent-based models for the evolution of morphological alternation patterns
Researchers have developed a multi-agent simulation to model the emergence and spread of morphological alternations in languages, such as the irregular past tense of 'go' being 'went'. The system incorporates realistic phonological rules, large lexicons, and various network topologies to mimic naturalistic language evolution. To evaluate the plausibility of the simulated morphologies, they introduced the AI Historical Linguist, an LLM-driven system that models a debate between linguists to compare real and simulated language patterns. AI