Linguistic Group Marking as an Emergent Phenomenon
Abstract
This paper examines how linguistic group marking can emerge from the interaction between social ecology, inferential cognition, and cultural transmission. An agent-based model (ABM) simulates interactions within a structured population where agents use domain-general inference and social learning to interpret and adopt linguistic variants. The model implements a mechanism in which uncertainty about strangers’ social affiliations increases reliance on social inference and investigates how variation in social memory and outgroup contact affects the resulting patterns of linguistic variation. Results show that under conditions of greater perceived social risk, the model produces greater use of inference and, subsequently, greater linguistic differentiation between groups. However, differentiation remains concentrated in particular linguistic features rather than producing a complete divergence of group repertoires. These findings suggest that linguistic group marking, characteristic of human language, can be understood as an emergent property of social conditions rather than a specialised adaptation. The model therefore provides a possible sociocognitive mechanism contributing to the broader process of linguistic polyphilia, while more generally aligning with accounts of complex linguistic structures as arising from domain-general cognition interacting with cultural evolution.
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BibTeX
@misc{moran2026linguistic,
title = {{Linguistic Group Marking as an Emergent Phenomenon}},
author = {Cormac Moran and Judit Casas-Riu and Cedric Boeckx},
howpublished = {EcoEvoRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.32942/x2h68c},
url = {https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/15544/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Linguistic Group Marking as an Emergent Phenomenon
AU - Cormac Moran
AU - Judit Casas-Riu
AU - Cedric Boeckx
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
PB - EcoEvoRxiv
DO - 10.32942/x2h68c
UR - https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/15544/
AB - This paper examines how linguistic group marking can emerge from the interaction between social ecology, inferential cognition, and cultural transmission. An agent-based model (ABM) simulates interactions within a structured population where agents use domain-general inference and social learning to interpret and adopt linguistic variants. The model implements a mechanism in which uncertainty about strangers’ social affiliations increases reliance on social inference and investigates how variation in social memory and outgroup contact affects the resulting patterns of linguistic variation. Results show that under conditions of greater perceived social risk, the model produces greater use of inference and, subsequently, greater linguistic differentiation between groups. However, differentiation remains concentrated in particular linguistic features rather than producing a complete divergence of group repertoires. These findings suggest that linguistic group marking, characteristic of human language, can be understood as an emergent property of social conditions rather than a specialised adaptation. The model therefore provides a possible sociocognitive mechanism contributing to the broader process of linguistic polyphilia, while more generally aligning with accounts of complex linguistic structures as arising from domain-general cognition interacting with cultural evolution.
ER -