All natural languages exhibit a distinction between content words (nouns, verbs, etc.) and function words (determiners, auxiliaries, tenses, etc.). Yet surprisingly little has been said about the emergence of this universal architectural feature of human language. This article argues that the existence of this distinction requires the presence of nontrivial compositionality and identifies assumptions that have previously been made in the literature that provably guarantee only trivial composition. It then presents a signaling game with variable contexts and shows how the distinction can emerge via reinforcement learning.

中文翻译：

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走向非平凡组合性的出现

所有自然语言都表现出内容词（名词、动词等）和功能词（限定词、助词、时态等）之间的区别。然而令人惊讶的是，关于人类语言的这种普遍的建筑特征的出现却鲜为人知。本文认为，这种区别的存在需要非平凡的组合性的存在，并确定了先前在文献中做出的假设，这些假设可证明仅保证平凡的组合。然后，它展示了一个具有可变上下文的信号游戏，并展示了如何通过强化学习来区分差异。