Languages are efficient, but for whom?

Trott, Sean; Bergen, Benjamin

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105094

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 63 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…use a suffixal marker in those plural values that would be otherwise homophonous with the SG. A bias towards homophony avoidance (Song & White 2022;Trott & Bergen 2022), together with the markednes of PL (vs SG) could potentially explain the tendency found in this paper for plural values to be associated to more and later positions within the word. This might explain the findings in Trommer (2003), where it is shown that in cases of more-or-less separative marking of person and plural number, the latter marker occurs almost unexceptionally in a later position, regardless of the affixes' order with respect to the root (cf.…”

Section: Relation To Category Clustering and Other Related Biasesmentioning

confidence: 58%

Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms: Evidence from positional splits

Herce¹,

Saldana²,

Mansfield³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same position (e.g., all subject agreement markers as suffixes, all object agreement markers as prefixes). However, little is known about the exceptions to this trend: cases where different values of the same feature are marked in different positions in the word (i.e., positional splits). In this study, we explore the positional properties of subject and object person-number agreement markers in a phylogenetically diverse sample of 227 languages. We find that the recurrence of a positional split is proportional to its degree of naturalness, that is, to the amount of shared feature values amongst the forms with the same positional arrangement. Natural patterns (e.g., where prefixal forms all share SG and suffixal forms all share PL) are over-represented in natural languages compared to a random baseline. The most unnatural patterns are underrepresented, and splits with an intermediate level of unnaturalness occur at around chance levels. We hypothesise that this graded bias for naturalness is grounded in a preference for morphological similarity amongst semantically similar forms during language learning and transmission. To test this hypothesis we conducted two online artificial language learning experiments where we trained and tested participants on person-number verbal agreement paradigms of different sizes with positional splits of different degrees of naturalness. We found that their relative learnability is also gradient (proportional to the amount of meaning overlap), thus matching the observed cross-linguistic tendencies. Our findings support the notion that semantic similarity shapes the evolution and transmission of morphological structure and that it does so in a gradient way.

show abstract

Section: Relation To Category Clustering and Other Related Biasesmentioning

confidence: 58%

Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms: Evidence from positional splits

Herce¹,

Saldana²,

Mansfield³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Every human being in the public sphere has varying logic and language skills. This makes it possible for everyone to have different perceptions, responses, and meanings when understanding speech (Saifullah, 2018;Trott & Bergen, 2022). Therefore, semantics exists to classify meaning on the basis of semantic theory analysis, namely lexical, grammatical, and referential semantics.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hate Speech against the Bima Tribe: A Semantic Study in Perspective for Forensic Linguistics

AKBAR,

Zamzani

2023

JELTAL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Language is one of the legal evidence tools that requires the field of linguistics to dissect disputed languages. The disputed language is inseparable from its ambiguous nature. Therefore, it is important that the language in question be analysed linguistically to help provide evidence in the judicial process. This paper aims to analyse speech as legal evidence. The study uses the methods of listening, recording, and using semantic approaches and forensic linguistics. The use of the listen-and-record method is necessary because the data is sourced from Saifudin Ibrahim's audio-visual video on Facebook and YouTube. The results of this study show that speech that has lexical meaning, such as people, humans, nations, or Bima, is speech that is directly intended by SI for its interlocutors. While the interlocutor referred to by SI is mentioned with words that are included in the referential meaning, such as the regent, his inferiority, Bima people, and brain, he is unable to express words or phrases referred to by SI as objects of discussion about his interlocutors. First, SI speech falls into several categories, primarily speech that attacks the honour of the Bima community by giving a negative assessment of the Bima community leader. Second, spreading fake news related to Bima society in the context of family and social psychology. Three utterances contain insults to the Bima tribe by degrading the ability or competence of the Bima people.

show abstract

“…A prominent viewpoint is that communication is structured to maximize efficiency (Gibson et al, 2019 ; Kemp et al, 2018 ; Piantadosi et al, 2011 ; Rubio-Fernandez & Jara-Ettinger, 2020 ; Trott & Bergen, 2022 ). As described by Gibson et al ( 2019 ), “Efficiency in communication means that successful communication can be achieved with minimal effort on average by the sender and receiver.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gaps in the Lexicon Restrict Communication

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Across languages, words carve up the world of experience in different ways. For example, English lacks an equivalent to the Chinese superordinate noun tiáowèipǐn, which is loosely translated as “ingredients used to season food while cooking.” Do such differences matter? A conventional label may offer a uniquely effective way of communicating. On the other hand, lexical gaps may be easily bridged by the compositional power of language. After all, most of the ideas we want to express do not map onto simple lexical forms. We conducted a referential Director/Matcher communication task with adult speakers of Chinese and English. Directors provided a clue that Matchers used to select words from a word grid. The three target words corresponded to a superordinate term (e.g., beverages) in either Chinese or English but not both. We found that Matchers were more accurate at choosing the target words when their language lexicalized the target category. This advantage was driven entirely by the Directors’ use/non-use of the intended superordinate term. The presence of a conventional superordinate had no measurable effect on speakers’ within- or between-category similarity ratings. These results show that the ability to rely on a conventional term is surprisingly important despite the flexibility languages offer to communicate about non-lexicalized categories.

show abstract

Languages are efficient, but for whom?

Cited by 8 publications

References 63 publications

Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms: Evidence from positional splits

Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms: Evidence from positional splits

Hate Speech against the Bima Tribe: A Semantic Study in Perspective for Forensic Linguistics

Gaps in the Lexicon Restrict Communication

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About