Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.