Convention and Innovation in Social Networks

Abstract. To depict the mechanisms that have enabled the emergence of semantic meaning, philosophers and researchers particularly access a game-theoretic model: the signaling game. In this article I will argue that this model is also quite appropriate to analyze not only the emer-gence of semantic meaning, but also semantic change. In other words, signaling games might help to depict mechanisms of language change. For that purpose the signaling game will be i) combined with innovative reinforcement learning and ii) conducted repeatedly as simulation runs in a multi-agent account, where agents are arranged in social network structures: scale-free networks with small-world properties. The results will give a deeper understanding of the role of environmental variables that might promote semantic change or support solidity of semantic con-ventions