{"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/"}]}