ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
The forms and meanings of grammatical markers support efficient communication.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Symmetry in category systems across languages.Nature communications · 2026Article
- An Efficient Communication Analysis of Modal Typology.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Towards Human-Like Emergent Communication via Utility, Informativeness, and Complexity.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Word reuse and combination support efficient communication of emerging concepts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Review
- Information-theoretic principles in incremental language production.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Understanding common human driving semantics for autonomous vehicles.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Communicative Efficiency or Iconic Learning: Do Acquisition and Communicative Pressures Interact to Shape Colour- Naming Systems?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Crosslinguistic word order variation reflects evolutionary pressures of dependency and information locality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Indefinite Pronouns Optimize the Simplicity/Informativeness Trade-Off.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- The forms and meanings of grammatical markers support efficient communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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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