Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Functionalist accounts of language suggest that formsare paired with meanings in ways that support efficientcommunication. Previous work on grammatical markingsuggests that word forms have lengths that enable efficientproduction, and previous work on the semantic typologyof the lexicon suggests that word meanings representefficient partitions of semantic space. Here we consider anintegrated information-theoretic framework that captures howcommunicative pressures influence both form and meaning.We take tense systems as a case study, and show how theframework explains both which tense systems are attestedacross languages and the length asymmetries of the forms inthose systems.