Systematicity between Forms and Meanings across Languages Supports Efficient Communication
This work addresses the gap in efficient communication theory regarding systematic relations in word forms, offering incremental insights into linguistic typology.
The study tackled the problem of how grammatical meanings map to word forms across languages, finding that verb and pronoun forms are shaped by competing pressures for simplicity and accuracy, with a novel complexity measure improving discrimination between attested and unattested systems.
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of grammatical meanings (e.g. person, number) are expressed on verbs and pronouns across typologically diverse languages. Consistent with prior work, we find that verb and pronoun forms are shaped by competing communicative pressures for simplicity (minimizing the inventory of grammatical distinctions) and accuracy (enabling recovery of intended meanings). Crucially, our proposed model uses a novel measure of complexity (inverse of simplicity) based on the learnability of meaning-to-form mappings. This innovation captures fine-grained regularities in linguistic form, allowing better discrimination between attested and unattested systems, and establishes a new connection from efficient communication theory to systematicity in natural language.