{"pk":27826,"title":"Communicative Efficiency, Uniform Information Density, and the Rational Speech Act theory","subtitle":null,"abstract":"One major class of approaches to explaining the distribu-tion of linguistic forms is rooted in communicative effi-ciency. For theories in which an utterance’s communica-tive efficiency is itself dependent on the distribution oflinguistic forms in the language, however, it is less clearhow to make distributional predictions that escape circu-larity. I propose an approach for these cases that involvesiterating between speaker and listener in the RationalSpeech Act theory. Characteristics of the fixed points ofthis iterative process constitute the distributional predic-tions of the theory. Through computer simulation I applythis approach to the well-studied case of predictability-sensitive optional function word omission for the theoryof Uniform Information Density, and show that the ap-proach strongly predicts the empirically observed nega-tive correlation between phrase onset probability and rateof function word use.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"communicative efficiency"},{"word":"Uniform information density"},{"word":"Rational speech act theory"},{"word":"Syntactic optionality"},{"word":"Pragmatics"},{"word":"Computational Modeling"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3m8596qg","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Roger","middle_name":"P","last_name":"Levy","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27826/galley/17465/download/"}]}