Levshina, Natalia
Communicative Efficiency: Language Structure and Use
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21714368 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Laura Becker (0000-0002-1835-9404, Department of Linguistics , 9174 University of Freiburg , Belfortstraße 18, 79098 Freiburg im Breisgau , Germany, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 367-378 |
| Publication date | 2024-07-26 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistic Typology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1430-0532 • E-ISSN: 1613-415X |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/lingty-2024-0013 |
| OpenAlex | W4393199990 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 36 |
The book Communicative Efficiency: Language Structure and Use takes the reader on a journey through various phenomena related to efficiency in language use and in grammatical structures.Efficiency is not a new topic in linguistics, and by now there is a large body of research on the topic from different linguistic angles, ranging from psycholinguistics to phonetics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, typology, sign language research, language evolution, and information theoretic approaches. 1 Strikingly, a comprehensive overview that would integrate these different approaches and findings was still missing.Levshina fills this gap by connecting different research traditions, and by relating various insights that have existed in a more disconnected way until now.In doing so, this book goes beyond a mere summary and synthesis of previous findings, and integrates new empirical results from corpus linguistics, typology, and artificial grammar learning with other findings from the literature on efficiency.By combining various research questions from different sub-disciplines in linguistics, Levshina not only offers a new approach to old questions, but opens a number of questions that serve as an inspiration for future work.Because of its wide scope and empirical and theoretical richness, this volume is likely to become the new standard reference for the topic of efficiency in language and communication.It is a valuable resource for phoneticians, phonologists, morphologists, corpus linguists, psycholinguists and typologists interested in efficiency in particular or in functional motivations in language use in general.For linguists from these various backgrounds, the book provides the larger context of research around efficiency and functional adaptation of linguistic structures to our communicative needs
Art · Art history · Linguistics · Media studies · Sociology · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy
Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency
Language, Usage and Cognition
Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language
Phonology and Language Use
Language redundancy predicts syllabic duration and the spectral characteristics of vocalic syllable nuclei
How Efficiency Shapes Human Language
Zipf’s word frequency law in natural language
Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication
Accessibility theory
Word informativity influences acoustic duration
Typological explanations in synchrony and diachrony
Perceptual optimization of language
Efficiency in human languages
Do dependency lengths explain constraints on crossing dependencies
The interdependence of frequency, predictability, and informativity in the segmental domain
Optimization of morpheme length
Coding efficiency in nominal inflection
Something Years of Work on Collocations
Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries
The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis
Referring and accessibility
How Speakers Refer
Morphological Organization
Across-Language Perspective on Speech Information Rate
On Diachronic Sources and Synchronic Pattern
Language style as audience design
| Highly cited | No |
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