APPLICATIONS OF THE PRICE EQUATION TO LANGUAGE EVOLUTION

In the early seventies, the bio-mathematician George Price developed a simple and concise mathematical description of evolutionary processes that abstracts away from the specific properties of biological evolution. In the talk I will argue argued that Price's framework is well-suited to model various aspects of the cultural evolution of language. The first part of the talk describes Price's approach in some detail. In the second part, case studies about its application to language evolution are presented.