Systematicity between Forms and Meanings across Languages Supports Efficient Communication
Doreen Osmelak Universität des Saarlandes, Yang Xu Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Michael Hahn, Kate McCurdy Universität des Saarlandes and University of Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of grammatical meanings (e.g. person, number) are expressed on verbs and pronouns across typologically diverse languages. Consistent with prior work, we find that verb and pronoun forms are shaped by competing communicative pressures for simplicity (minimizing the inventory of grammatical distinctions) and accuracy (enabling recovery of intended meanings). Crucially, our proposed model uses a novel measure of complexity (inverse of simplicity) based on the learnability of meaning-to-form mappings. This innovation captures fine-grained regularities in linguistic form, allowing better discrimination between attested and unattested systems, and establishes a new connection from efficient communication theory to systematicity in natural language.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表