Indefinite Pronouns Optimize the Simplicity/Informativeness Trade‐Off

Abstract

The vocabulary of human languages has been argued to support efficient communication by optimizing the trade-off between simplicity and informativeness. The argument has been originally based on cross-linguistic analyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of content words, such as kinship, color, and number terms. The present work applies this analysis to a category of function words: indefinite pronouns (e.g., someone, anyone, no one). We build on previous work to establish the meaning space and featural make-up for indefinite pronouns, and show that indefinite pronoun systems across languages optimize the simplicity/informativeness trade-off. This demonstrates that pressures for efficient communication shape both content and function word categories. In doing so, our work aligns with several concurrent studies exploring the simplicity/informativeness trade-off in functional vocabulary. Importantly, we further argue that the trade-off may explain some of the universal properties of indefinite pronouns, thus reducing the explanatory load for linguistic theories.

The evolution of efficient compression in signaling games

“…A hypothesis in linguistics is that the natural languages are (near) solutions to this multi-objective optimization problem, and that these ef-ficiency pressures explain constraints on crosslinguistic semantic variation (Kemp & Regier, 2012;Kemp et al, 2018). This efficient communication hypothesis has been successfully applied across a variety of semantic domains including kinship terms, color terms, number terms, container terms, quantifiers, tense and evidentiality, boolean connectives, person systems, indefinite pronouns and modals (Denić et al, 2022;Imel & Steinert-Threlkeld, 2022;Kemp & Regier, 2012;Mollica et al, 2021;Regier et al, 2015;Uegaki, 2021;Xu et al, 2016;Zaslavsky et al, 2018;Zaslavsky et al, 2021).…”

The use of the indefinite pronoun keegi ‘someone’ in Estonian dialects

“…According to Martin Haspelmath's classic definition, indefinite pronouns are pronouns 'whose main function is to express indefinite reference' (Haspelmath Denić, Steinert-Threlkeld & Szymanik (2022), indefinite pronouns may have various functions and various referential values, showing that indefiniteness is not a clear-cut category and is internally heterogeneous. Haspelmath (1997) has listed nine main functions of indefinite pronouns, and Denić et al (2022) have reduced this number to six main semantic 'flavours': specific known, specific unknown, nonspecific, negative polarity, free choice, and negative indefinite. Most European languages have more than one indefinite pronoun for covering this range of meanings; however, in Estonian, keegi can be used for all of them.…”

“…However, Estonian also has a non-sentential negative marker mitte 'not', which, used together with keegi 'nobody' or miski 'nothing', has the function of emphasising the negativity and clarifying the meaning. In the previously mentioned categories, mitte indefinite pronoun can be considered to be a morphologically negative indefinite, or a negative indefinite in terms of Haspelmath (1997) and Denić et al (2022).…”

A Database for Modal Semantic Typology

“…For example, it can enable the verification of robust semantic universals (Nauze, 2008;Vander Klok, 2013b; and possibly trigger the formulation of new ones. Similarly, these data and their format can be used in comparison to artificial languages to attempt to explain what pressures have shaped semantic typology in the domain of modality, as has been done in several other domains (Kemp and Regier, 2012;Zaslavsky et al, 2018;Steinert-Threlkeld andSzymanik, 2019, 2020;Steinert-Threlkeld, 2021;Denić et al, 2022;Mollica et al, 2021;Uegaki, 2022, i.a. ).…”