144 research outputs found
Color naming reflects both perceptual structure and communicative need
Gibson et al. (2017) argued that color naming is shaped by patterns of
communicative need. In support of this claim, they showed that color naming
systems across languages support more precise communication about warm colors
than cool colors, and that the objects we talk about tend to be warm-colored
rather than cool-colored. Here, we present new analyses that alter this
picture. We show that greater communicative precision for warm than for cool
colors, and greater communicative need, may both be explained by perceptual
structure. However, using an information-theoretic analysis, we also show that
color naming across languages bears signs of communicative need beyond what
would be predicted by perceptual structure alone. We conclude that color naming
is shaped both by perceptual structure, as has traditionally been argued, and
by patterns of communicative need, as argued by Gibson et al. - although for
reasons other than those they advanced
Two Predicted Universals in the Semantics of Space
Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics
Society: General Session and Parasession on Semantic Typology and
Semantic Universals (1993
Semantic Categories of Artifacts and Animals Reflect Efficient Coding
It has been argued that semantic categories across languages reflect pressure
for efficient communication. Recently, this idea has been cast in terms of a
general information-theoretic principle of efficiency, the Information
Bottleneck (IB) principle, and it has been shown that this principle accounts
for the emergence and evolution of named color categories across languages,
including soft structure and patterns of inconsistent naming. However, it is
not yet clear to what extent this account generalizes to semantic domains other
than color. Here we show that it generalizes to two qualitatively different
semantic domains: names for containers, and for animals. First, we show that
container naming in Dutch and French is near-optimal in the IB sense, and that
IB broadly accounts for soft categories and inconsistent naming patterns in
both languages. Second, we show that a hierarchy of animal categories derived
from IB captures cross-linguistic tendencies in the growth of animal
taxonomies. Taken together, these findings suggest that fundamental
information-theoretic principles of efficient coding may shape semantic
categories across languages and across domains.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019
The forms and meanings of grammatical markers support efficient communication
Functionalist accounts of language suggest that forms are paired with meanings in ways that support efficient communication. Previous work on grammatical marking suggests that word forms have lengths that enable efficient production, and work on the semantic typology of the lexicon suggests that word meanings represent efficient partitions of semantic space. Here we establish a theoretical link between these two lines of work and present an information-theoretic analysis that captures how communicative pressures influence both form and meaning. We apply our approach to the grammatical features of number, tense, and evidentiality and show that the approach explains both which systems of feature values are attested across languages and the relative lengths of the forms for those feature values. Our approach shows that general information-theoretic principles can capture variation in both form and meaning across languages
Aquilegia, Vol. 31 No. 2, Summer 2007, Newsletter of the Colorado Native Plant Society
https://epublications.regis.edu/aquilegia/1120/thumbnail.jp
Universal Artifacts Affect the Branching of Phylogenetic Trees, Not Universal Scaling Laws
The superficial resemblance of phylogenetic trees to other branching structures allows searching for macroevolutionary patterns. However, such trees are just statistical inferences of particular historical events. Recent meta-analyses report finding regularities in the branching pattern of phylogenetic trees. But is this supported by evidence, or are such regularities just methodological artifacts? If so, is there any signal in a phylogeny?In order to evaluate the impact of polytomies and imbalance on tree shape, the distribution of all binary and polytomic trees of up to 7 taxa was assessed in tree-shape space. The relationship between the proportion of outgroups and the amount of imbalance introduced with them was assessed applying four different tree-building methods to 100 combinations from a set of 10 ingroup and 9 outgroup species, and performing covariance analyses. The relevance of this analysis was explored taking 61 published phylogenies, based on nucleic acid sequences and involving various taxa, taxonomic levels, and tree-building methods.All methods of phylogenetic inference are quite sensitive to the artifacts introduced by outgroups. However, published phylogenies appear to be subject to a rather effective, albeit rather intuitive control against such artifacts. The data and methods used to build phylogenetic trees are varied, so any meta-analysis is subject to pitfalls due to their uneven intrinsic merits, which translate into artifacts in tree shape. The binary branching pattern is an imposition of methods, and seldom reflects true relationships in intraspecific analyses, yielding artifactual polytomies in short trees. Above the species level, the departure of real trees from simplistic random models is caused at least by two natural factors--uneven speciation and extinction rates; and artifacts such as choice of taxa included in the analysis, and imbalance introduced by outgroups and basal paraphyletic taxa. This artifactual imbalance accounts for tree shape convergence of large trees.There is no evidence for any universal scaling in the tree of life. Instead, there is a need for improved methods of tree analysis that can be used to discriminate the noise due to outgroups from the phylogenetic signal within the taxon of interest, and to evaluate realistic models of evolution, correcting the retrospective perspective and explicitly recognizing extinction as a driving force. Artifacts are pervasive, and can only be overcome through understanding the structure and biological meaning of phylogenetic trees. Catalan Abstract in Translation S1
- …