LING2190 - Language games and cultural evolution

This is a course about how language and communication can be thought of as games. When people use language to communicate, they are following rules to perform actions that have an effect on the world, including other people. These actions might achieve goals, and they might prompt further actions, and so on. Perhaps more interestingly, these linguistic actions can, over time, lead to changes in the environment and even the rules of the game itself. In other words, the playing field changes dynamically as a result of the actions performed on it.
This way of looking at language is not new, and this is also a course about how thinking about language this way can inspire (and has inspired) formal models and laboratory experiments that help us to understand how language works and how it evolves. In covering this we will also touch on how the same approach has shed light on cultural evolution beyond language and communication alone.