MoL-2019-19: The influence of the simplicity/informativeness trade-off on the sematic typology of quantifiers

MoL-2019-19: Posdijk, Wouter (2019) The influence of the simplicity/informativeness trade-off on the sematic typology of quantifiers. [Report]

[thumbnail of MoL-2019-19.text.pdf]
Preview
Text
MoL-2019-19.text.pdf

Download (966kB) | Preview

Abstract

Previous research has shown that a trade-off between simplicity and informativeness can explain the semantic typology of various semantic domains of content words, such as color, kinship and folk biology (Kemp, Xu & Regier, 2018). In this thesis, I investigate whether this trade-off extends to quantifiers, a domain of function words with a well-established semantic typology. In particular, I develop measures of simplicity (based on logical description length) and informativeness (based on communicative use) of individual quantifiers and quantifier languages and I investigate the relation between properties of natural languages, such as monotonicity, to optimality with respect to the trade-off. Results show that languages of natural quantifiers perform better than random languages, and that monotonicity correlates with how optimal a language is.

Item Type: Report
Report Nr: MoL-2019-19
Series Name: Master of Logic Thesis (MoL) Series
Year: 2019
Subjects: Language
Logic
Depositing User: Dr Marco Vervoort
Date Deposited: 17 Oct 2019 15:17
Last Modified: 18 Oct 2019 20:23
URI: https://eprints.illc.uva.nl/id/eprint/1716

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item