摘要：Van Trijp (2010) convincingly shows that very little linguistic information¡ªor even none at all¡ªis needed to produce multifunctional linguistic markers. Although it still remains to be demonstrated that the mechanisms used in his artificial world will lead to multifunctionality and semantic maps which are similar to the semantic maps that are attested in the "real" world, it is promising to see multifunctionality arising without pre-established grammatical categories. Still, I disagree with van Trijp about the nature of the mechanism that he uses to obtain multifunctionality, namely analogical reasoning. In contrast to his claim, I think that this mechanism should be considered an implicit universal semantic map. Even though my impression is that this disagreement is only a matter of words rather than one of content, I still think the issue is important enough to be clarified in more detail. In the last paragraph of Section 3.2, van Trijp writes that "the algorithm for analogical reasoning [¡] does not implement an implicit universal [semantic map]".1His algorithm for analogical reasoning provides the artificial agents with a method to determine the similarity between sensory events. If each event is conceived as a point in conceptual space, then the algorithm thus provides structure among these points. Given enough artificially produced languages, I expect that the lexicalizations of these points will (on average) replicate the sensory similarity between the events
