Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Efficient communication accounts of cross-linguistic variation propose that languages trade-off informativeness and complexity based on communicative need, often measured by usage frequency and operationalized as a free parameter. We propose that this need is not uniform across discursive genres and that the narrative genre applies a stronger pressure for lexical informativeness than non-narrative genres. Using spoken-language data from typologically diverse languages, we analyze the informativeness of lexical fields in narrative and other genres, as operationalized by their lexical richness. We show that frequency in narrative genres predicts lexical richness more strongly than in other genres. This supports the theory that narrative is a privileged communicative context that drives the informativity displayed by different parts of the lexicon.