Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

Regier, Terry; Kemp, Charles; Kay, Paul

doi:10.1002/9781118346136.ch11

Cited by 138 publications

(148 citation statements)

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“…Our analyses provide evidence that the large majority of directions of metaphorical extensions over history can be explained by a compact set of variables, which suggests that metaphor provides an efficient way of compressing emerging meanings into an existing lexicon, without requiring the construction of word forms de novo. Our work thus extends previous studies about communicative and cognitive constraints on synchronic features of language such as word length (Piantadosi et al, 2011;Zipf, 1949) and semantic structures (Kemp & Regier, 2012;Regier et al, 2015) to explain the evolution of metaphorical polysemy in the lexicon (cf. Blank and Koch, 1999;Geeraerts, 1997).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium

Malt

Srinivasan

2017

Cognitive Psychology

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TitleEvolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium Data AvailabilityThe data associated with this publication are available upon request. One way that languages are able to communicate a potentially infinite set of ideas through a finite lexicon is by compressing emerging meanings into words, such that over time, individual words come to express multiple, related senses of meaning. We propose that overarching communicative and cognitive pressures have created systematic directionality in how new metaphorical senses have developed from existing word senses over the history of English. Given a large set of pairs of semantic domains, we used computational models to test which domains have been more commonly the starting points (source domains) and which the ending points (target domains) of metaphorical mappings over the past millennium. We found that a compact set of variables, including externality, embodiment, and valence, explain directionality in the majority of about 5000 metaphorical mappings recorded over the past 1100 years. These results provide the first large-scale historical evidence that metaphorical mapping is systematic, and driven by measurable communicative and cognitive principles. Published by Elsevier Inc.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium

Malt

Srinivasan

2017

Cognitive Psychology

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“…Our results favor a reconciliation of these ideas through the the efficient-communication hypothesis (11), which states that categories reflect a tradeoff between informativeness of the terms and their number (10). Objects in the Microsoft Research Asia database of 20,000 photographs were identified by human observers who were blind to the purpose of our study (31).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

“…To compare color communication efficiency across languages, we follow others (3,11) in estimating the overall informativeness of the color system of each language by averaging the average surprisal across the chips (Eq. 2; see SI Appendix, section 3 for a worked-out example): X c PðcÞSðcÞ.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Are WARM and COOL universal categories, and if so, why? Here we address these questions by collecting an extensive original dataset in three cultures and leveraging an information-theoretic analysis that has been useful in uncovering the structure of communication systems (10,11).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…We analyzed our data using information theory, building on work that suggests that color naming can be better understood by considering informativeness rather than opponent-process theory (3,11,15). This analysis can be understood in terms of a communication game (16)(17)(18).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Color naming across languages reflects color use

Gibson

Futrell

Jara‐Ettinger

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

237

245

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What determines how languages categorize colors? We analyzed results of the World Color Survey (WCS) of 110 languages to show that despite gross differences across languages, communication of chromatic chips is always better for warm colors (yellows/reds) than cool colors (blues/greens). We present an analysis of color statistics in a large databank of natural images curated by human observers for salient objects and show that objects tend to have warm rather than cool colors. These results suggest that the cross-linguistic similarity in color-naming efficiency reflects colors of universal usefulness and provide an account of a principle (color use) that governs how color categories come about. We show that potential methodological issues with the WCS do not corrupt information-theoretic analyses, by collecting original data using two extreme versions of the colornaming task, in three groups: the Tsimane', a remote Amazonian hunter-gatherer isolate; Bolivian-Spanish speakers; and English speakers. These data also enabled us to test another prediction of the color-usefulness hypothesis: that differences in color categorization between languages are caused by differences in overall usefulness of color to a culture. In support, we found that color naming among Tsimane' had relatively low communicative efficiency, and the Tsimane' were less likely to use color terms when describing familiar objects. Color-naming among Tsimane' was boosted when naming artificially colored objects compared with natural objects, suggesting that industrialization promotes color usefulness.color categorization | information theory | color cognition | Whorfian hypothesis | basic color terms

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Cognition and Communication

Scott‐Phillips

2018

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology

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Communication is a critical type of interaction for all social species, but especially so for humans. This is because it is a major means by which humans interact with one another and the main means by which cultural items propagate through a community. Humans, and likely only humans, have evolved a type of communication—ostensive communication—that has an essentially unlimited expressive potential. Canonical examples include points, shrugs, and grunts. The expressive potential of this type of communication is further enhanced by the use of words, grammars, and other communicative conventions that collectively comprise a language. The emergence of this type of communication likely had several important evolutionary consequences for the human animal.

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Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

Cited by 138 publications

References 54 publications

Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium

Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium

Color naming across languages reflects color use

Cognition and Communication

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