期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2018
卷号：115
期号：31
页码：7937-7942
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1800521115
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：We derive a principled information-theoretic account of cross-language semantic variation. Specifically, we argue that languages efficiently compress ideas into words by optimizing the information bottleneck (IB) trade-off between the complexity and accuracy of the lexicon. We test this proposal in the domain of color naming and show that ( i ) color-naming systems across languages achieve near-optimal compression; ( ii ) small changes in a single trade-off parameter account to a large extent for observed cross-language variation; ( iii ) efficient IB color-naming systems exhibit soft rather than hard category boundaries and often leave large regions of color space inconsistently named, both of which phenomena are found empirically; and ( iv ) these IB systems evolve through a sequence of structural phase transitions, in a single process that captures key ideas associated with different accounts of color category evolution. These results suggest that a drive for information-theoretic efficiency may shape color-naming systems across languages. This principle is not specific to color, and so it may also apply to cross-language variation in other semantic domains.
关键词：information theory ; semantic typology ; color naming ; categories ; language evolution
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