Friday, December 14, 2012
12:45 PM
CSB 703
Steven T. Piantadosi
University of Rochester
The communicative design of human language
I'll talk about recent work in collaboration with Ted Gibson and Hal
Tily arguing that key features of linguistic systems are well-designed
specifically for communicative purposes, in contrast to some popular
linguistic theories. I'll discuss our results testing for communicative
design in lexical systems, and (briefly) language processing mechanisms.
One of the primary arguments against communicative language design is
the existence of ambiguity, which appears naively to be undesirable in a
communication system. In contrast, I'll additionally argue that
ambiguity falls out naturally from considerations of communicative
efficiency. In general, our results suggest that an
information-theoretic approach provides principled explanations for some
otherwise puzzling feature of human language.