Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The goal of this paper is to uncover how conceptualizations of linguistic structure differ between the practice of research on language emergence and standard, formalized approaches of philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. We analyze a corpus of 5000 scientific articles within the field of language emergence. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, we combine computational analysis—semantic search, topic modelling, and collocation analysis—with qualitative close reading. Results indicate that researchers in language emergence view linguistic structure as a complex phenomenon, which cuts across some existing theoretical distinctions, most importantly between "compositional" and "contextual" accounts. These results indicate the need for a new view of the systematicity of linguistic structure.