Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 118, Issue 49, Pages -Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2025993118
Keywords
communicative efficiency; grammatical features; linguistic typology; information theory
Categories
Funding
- Brain and Cognitive Sciences fellowship
- Australian Research Council [FT190100200]
- Australian Research Council [FT190100200] Funding Source: Australian Research Council
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Functionalists suggest that forms and meanings in language are paired in ways that support efficient communication. Previous studies on grammatical marking and semantic typology of the lexicon show the efficiency of word forms and meanings. The information-theoretic analysis in this study reveals how communicative pressures influence both form and meaning.
Functionalist accounts of language suggest that forms are paired with meanings in ways that support efficient communication. Previous work on grammatical marking suggests that word forms have lengths that enable efficient production, and work on the semantic typology of the lexicon suggests that word meanings represent efficient partitions of semantic space. Here we establish a theoretical link between these two lines of work and present an information-theoretic analysis that captures how communicative pressures influence both form and meaning. We apply our approach to the grammatical features of number, tense, and evidentiality and show that the approach explains both which systems of feature values are attested across languages and the relative lengths of the forms for those feature values. Our approach shows that general information-theoretic principles can capture variation in both form and meaning across languages.
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