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