Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Semantic categories in the world’s languages often reflect a historical process of chaining: A name for one idea is extended to a conceptually related idea, and from there on to other ideas, producing a chain of concepts that all bear the same name. The beginning and end points of such a chain might in prin- ciple be conceptually rather dissimilar. There is also evidence supporting a contrasting picture: Languages tend to support efficient, informative communication, often through semantic categories in which all exemplars are similar. Here, we explore this tension through computational analyses of existing cross- language naming and sorting data from the domain of house- hold containers. We find: (1) formal evidence for historical se- mantic chaining, and (2) evidence that systems of categories in this domain nonetheless support near-optimally efficient com- munication. Our results suggest that semantic chaining may be constrained by the functional need for efficient, informative communication.