Communicative Efficiency in Human Languages

Presenters: Natalia Levshina

T2TFA1

There is rich evidence that language users try to communicate efficiently, saving time and effort while making sure that they transfer the intended message successfully. In this workshop we will start by discussing the general principles of communicative efficiency in human languages and beyond. Then we will survey numerous manifestations of communicative efficiency from different linguistic domains, such as Accessibility Theory, phonological reduction of predictable units, Zipf’s law of abbreviation, omission of funciton words, minimization of domains and syntactic dependencies, diverse markedness phenomena, and many others. In several in-depth case studies we will discuss evidence from typology, corpora and experiments, which will illustrate how different types of linguistic data and methods can be used for detecting efficient structures and usage patterns. During this interactive workshop, the participants will do practical exercises and brainstorm potential applications of the theory for their own research projects. By the end of the workshop, attendees will be able to evaluate language structures and patterns of variation from the perspective of communicative efficiency, and to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of different theoretical claims and empirical methods.

Keywords: Communicative Efficiency, Pragmatics, Morphosyntax, Psycholinguistics, Typology, Usage-Based Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Theoretical Frameworks

Presenters

Natalia Levshina

Radboud University

Natalia Levshina is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Computational Methods at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She previously worked at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Dr. Levshina’s active research interests include linguistic typology, corpora, cognitive and functional linguistics. She is known as the author of “How to Do Linguistics with R: Data Exploration and Statistical Analysis” (John Benjamins, 2015). In her book “Communicative Efficiency: Language structure and use” (Cambridge University Press, 2022) she formulates the main principles of communicatively efficient linguistic behaviour and shows how these principles can explain why human languages are the way they are.