ArticleCognitive science2022
Indefinite Pronouns Optimize the Simplicity/Informativeness Trade-Off.
Article in Cognitive science, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Symmetry in category systems across languages.Nature communications · 2026Article
- An Efficient Communication Analysis of Modal Typology.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
The vocabulary of human languages has been argued to support efficient communication by optimizing the trade-off between simplicity and informativeness. The argument has been originally based on cross-linguistic analyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of content words, such as kinship, color, and number terms. The present work applies this analysis to a category of function words: indefinite pronouns (e.g., someone, anyone, no one). We build on previous work to establish the meaning space and featural make-up for indefinite pronouns, and show that indefinite pronoun systems across languages optimize the simplicity/informativeness trade-off. This demonstrates that pressures for efficient communication shape both content and function word categories. In doing so, our work aligns with several concurrent studies exploring the simplicity/informativeness trade-off in functional vocabulary. Importantly, we further argue that the trade-off may explain some of the universal properties of indefinite pronouns, thus reducing the explanatory load for linguistic theories.
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