Gemma Boleda
When Do Languages Use the Same Word for Different Meanings? The Goldilocks Principle in the Lexicon
15.12.2021, 5:00 PM (UTC)15.12.2021, 2:00 PM (Local*)
Gemma Boleda
Gemma Boleda is an ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain, where she heads the Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (COLT) research group. She previously held post-doctoral positions at the Department of Linguistics of The University of Texas at Austin, USA, and the CIMEC Center for Brain/Mind Sciences of the University of Trento, Italy. In her research, currently funded by an ERC Starting Grant, Dr. Boleda uses quantitative and computational methods to better understand how natural languages convey meaning. She is a member of the standing review committee of the TACL journal. She acted as area co-chair of ACL 2016, program co-chair of *SEM 2015, and local co-chair of ESSLLI 2015, and was an elected Information Officer of the SIGSEM Board 2013-2020.
It is common for languages to express multiple meanings with the same word, a phenomenon known as “colexification”. For instance, the meanings FINGER and TOE colexify in the word ‘dit’ in Catalan (the word ‘dit’ expresses both meanings), while they do not colexify in English. Colexification has been suggested to follow universal constraints. In particular, previous work has shown that related meanings are more prone to colexify. This tendency has been explained in terms of the cognitive pressure for simplicity, since expressing related meanings with the same word makes lexicons easier to learn and use. The present study examines the interplay between this pressure and a competing universal constraint, the functional pressure for languages to maximize informativeness. We hypothesize that colexification follows a Goldilocks principle: meanings are more likely to colexify if they are related (fostering simplicity), but not so related as to become confusable and cause misunderstandings (fostering informativeness). We find support for this principle in data from over 1200 languages and 1400 meanings. Our results thus suggest that universal principles shape the lexicons of natural languages, and contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that languages evolve to strike a balance between competing functional and cognitive pressures.
