Milica Denic, Universiteit van Amsterdam<\/em><\/p>\n Tuesday, 23.06.2020 The vocabulary of human languages has been argued to support efficient communication by optimizing the trade-off between complexity and informativeness (Kemp & Regier, 2012). The argument has been based on cross-linguistic analyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of content words such as kinship, color, and number terms. The present work extends this analysis to a category of function words: indefinite pronouns (e.g. someone, anyone, no-one, cf. Haspelmath, 2001). We establish the meaning space and feature-based representations for indefinite pronouns, and show that indefinite pronoun systems across languages optimize the complexity\/informativeness trade-off. This demonstrates that pressures for efficient communication shape both content and function word categories, thus tying in with the conclusions of recent work on quantifiers (Steinert-Threlkeld, 2019). Furthermore, we argue that the trade-off may explain some of the universal properties of indefinite pronouns, thus reducing the explanatory load for linguistic theories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Complexity\/informativeness trade-off in the domain of indefinite pronouns Milica Denic, Universiteit van Amsterdam Tuesday, 23.06.2020 11:00 – 12:00 Room: [virtual Zoom talk] The vocabulary of human languages has been argued to support efficient communication by optimizing the trade-off between complexity and informativeness (Kemp & Regier, 2012). The argument has been based on cross-linguistic analyses of … Continue reading June 23nd: Milica Denic<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3529"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3535,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3529\/revisions\/3535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n11:00 – 12:00
\nRoom: [virtual Zoom talk]<\/p>\n