Word meanings across languages support efficient communication

Abstract

This chapter proposes that systems of semantic categories in the world's languages reflect the need for efficient communication, in that they near-optimally balance the competing principles of simplicity and informativeness. It first briefly reviews existing work that is relevant to the proposal. Next, it develops a general-purpose computational framework that instantiates the proposal, and applies it to three domains (a) color, (b) kinship, and (c) a domain in which objects are represented as binary feature vectors with qualitatively different structures. The analyses of color and kinship have shown that the framework accounts for cross-language data in both of these domains. The analysis o..