Why do languages have the semantic categories they do? Each language partitions human experience into a system of semantic categories, labeled by words or morphemes, which are used to communicate about experience. These categories often differ widely across languages. Thus, languages do not merely provide different labels for the same universally shared set of categories—instead, both the labels and the categories themselves may be to some extent language-specific. However this cross-language variation is constrained. Words with similar or identical meanings often appear in unrelated languages, and most logically possi- ble meanings are unattested—suggesting that there are universal forces constraining the cross-language diversity. Accounting for this pattern of wide but constrained variation is a central theoretical challenge in understanding why languages have the particular forms they do.
Previous approaches to this problem have often pursued a single semantic domain in detail, and have pro- posed solutions based on principles specific to that domain. For example, color naming has been viewed as constrained by a set of universal focal colors, and kinship categories as shaped by constraints specific to kinship. Here, we advance an account of semantic variation that is instead grounded in a simple functional principle that holds across domains: that language should support efficient communication. Specifically, following Rosch and others, we argue that good systems of categories are simple, which minimizes cogni- tive load, and informative, which maximizes communicative effectiveness. These two constraints compete against each other, and we propose that semantic systems in the world’s languages tend to achieve a near- optimal tradeoff between these two constraints.
Previous approaches to this problem have often pursued a single semantic domain in detail, and have pro- posed solutions based on principles specific to that domain. For example, color naming has been viewed as constrained by a set of universal focal colors, and kinship categories as shaped by constraints specific to kinship. Here, we advance an account of semantic variation that is instead grounded in a simple functional principle that holds across domains: that language should support efficient communication. Specifically, following Rosch and others, we argue that good systems of categories are simple, which minimizes cogni- tive load, and informative, which maximizes communicative effectiveness. These two constraints compete against each other, and we propose that semantic systems in the world’s languages tend to achieve a near- optimal tradeoff between these two constraints.