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{
    "pk": 29609,
    "title": "Complexity/informativeness trade-off in the domain of indefinite pronouns",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "The vocabulary of human languages has been argued to support efficient communication by optimizing the trade-offbetween complexity and informativeness (Kemp and Regier, 2012). The argument has been based on cross-linguisticanalyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of content words such as kinship, color, and number terms. The present workextends 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 indefinitepronoun systems across languages optimize the complexity/informativeness trade-off. This demonstrates that pressuresfor efficient communication shape both content and function word categories, thus tying in with the conclusions of recentwork on quantifiers (Steinert-Threlkeld, 2019). Furthermore, we argue that the trade-off may explain some of the universalproperties of indefinite pronouns, thus reducing the explanatory load for linguistic theories.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [],
    "section": "Poster Session 1",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4xq5x5bq",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Milica",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Denic",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of Amsterdam",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Shane",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Steinert-Threlkeld",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of Washington",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Jakub",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Szymanik",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of Amsterdam",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2020-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29609/galley/19468/download/"
        }
    ]
}