Alternative Solutions to a Language Design Problem: The Role of Adjectives and Gender Marking in Efficient Communication

Abstract

A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One long-standing puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender. In an information theoretic analysis of German noun classification, Dye, Milin, Futrell, and Ramscar (2017) enumerated a number of important processing advantages gender confers. Yet this raises a further puzzle: If gender systems are so beneficial to processing, what does this mean for languages that make do without them? Here, we compare the communicative function of gender marking in German (a deterministic system) to that of prenominal adjectives in English (a probabilistic one), finding that despite their differences, both systems act to efficiently smooth information over discourse, making nouns more equally predictable in context. We examine why evolutionary pressures may favor one system over another and discuss the implications for compositional accounts of meaning and Gricean principles of communication.

How Efficiency Shapes Human Language

“…Grammatical gender marking serves exactly this purpose: knowing ahead of time whether a noun is "masculine" or "feminine" reduces uncertainty about lexical identity [123,124]. In languages without gender marking, this same role may be filled by redundant prenominal adjectives [125]. More generally, such redundant marking may play a role similar to parity bits in information-theoretic codes: they provide redundancy that makes the linguistic signal robust to noise.…”

Source codes in human communication

“…Convergent support for the suggestion that regular and irregular patterns reflect a predictability and discriminability trade-off within linguistic codes comes from studies of grammatical gender (Dye, Milin, Futrell & Ramscar, 2017). Grammatical gender -i.e., the linguistic practice of assigning nouns to discrete classes that share some morphological properties -has traditionally been derided as being both unsystematic and functionless by linguists (Bloomfield, 1933;Kilarski, 2007;Corbett, 1991), however for a species as disposed towards technology as homo sapiens, nouns pose problems that dwarf those of many other parts of speech (Dye, Milin, Futrell & Ramscar, 2018), namely that humankind has a remarkably propensity for inventing new things, and these new things usually need names. As a result, the set of named objects in most languages is vast and growing all the time (such that any given speaker will never encounter many of the nouns in their native language).…”

“…By contrast, it is the way that gender distributed across high frequency German nouns that makes the system appeared 'arbitrary.' This is because gender serves a discriminative function for these nouns: as the likelihood that two high frequency German nouns will occur in the same lexical contexts increases, so does the likelihood that their gender will differ, increasing the discriminability of these nouns in context (Dye et al 2018, show that in English, a largely non-gendered language, the distribution of pre-nominal adjectives serves a similar function).…”

How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech

“…This suggests that the moment-to-moment uncertainty experienced in communication may differ in speech as compared to written language, and it may be that more effort is invested in uncertainty reduction in spoken than in written language. From this perspective, the increase in the lexical variety in prenominal adjectives, which in English reduce uncertainty about upcoming nouns [ 31 ], might be functional in that it may help manage the extra uncertainty in spoken communication. This raises the question of the degree to which these and other variational changes in spoken English are indeed informative and systematic.…”