TY - GEN
T1 - Let’s talk (efficiently) about us
T2 - 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021
AU - Zaslavsky, Noga
AU - Maldonado, Mora
AU - Culbertson, Jennifer
N1 - Funding Information: N.Z. was supported by a BCS Fellowship in Computation. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 757643 to J.C.).
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Systems of personal pronouns (e.g.,‘you’ and ‘I’) vary widely across languages, but at the same time not all possible systems are attested. Linguistic theories have generally accounted for this in terms of strong grammatical constraints, but recent experimental work challenges this view. Here, we take a novel approach to understanding personal pronoun systems by invoking a recent information-theoretic framework for semantic systems that predicts that languages efficiently compress meanings into forms. We find that a test set of cross-linguistically attested personal pronoun systems achieves near-optimal compression, supporting the hypothesis that efficient compression shapes semantic systems. Further, our best-fitting model includes an egocentric bias that favors a salient speaker representation, accounting for a well-known typological generalization of person systems (‘Zwicky’s Generalization’) without the need for a hard grammatical constraint.
AB - Systems of personal pronouns (e.g.,‘you’ and ‘I’) vary widely across languages, but at the same time not all possible systems are attested. Linguistic theories have generally accounted for this in terms of strong grammatical constraints, but recent experimental work challenges this view. Here, we take a novel approach to understanding personal pronoun systems by invoking a recent information-theoretic framework for semantic systems that predicts that languages efficiently compress meanings into forms. We find that a test set of cross-linguistically attested personal pronoun systems achieves near-optimal compression, supporting the hypothesis that efficient compression shapes semantic systems. Further, our best-fitting model includes an egocentric bias that favors a salient speaker representation, accounting for a well-known typological generalization of person systems (‘Zwicky’s Generalization’) without the need for a hard grammatical constraint.
KW - efficient coding
KW - information theory
KW - person systems
KW - pronouns
KW - semantic typology
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85117960076
VL - 43
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
SP - 938
EP - 944
BT - Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
Y2 - 26 July 2021 through 29 July 2021
ER -