Linguistic Frankenstein, or How to test universal constraints without real languages

The scarcity of diachronic data represents a serious problem when linguists try to explain a typological universal. To overcome this empirical bottleneck, one can simulate the process of language evolution in artificial language learning experiments. After a brief discussion of the main principles and findings of such experiments, this paper presents a case study of causative constructions showing that language users have a bias towards the efficient organisation of communication. They regularise their linguistic input such that more frequent causative situations are expressed by shorter forms, and less frequent situations are expressed by longer forms. This supports the economy-based explanation of the universal form-meaning mapping found in causative constructions of different languages.