33.2826, Calls: Cog Sci, Comp Ling, Gen Ling, Pragmatics, Psycholing/Germany

Sat Sep 17 02:45:03 UTC 2022

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-2826. Sat Sep 17 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.2826, Calls: Cog Sci, Comp Ling, Gen Ling, Pragmatics, Psycholing/Germany

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Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2022 02:44:20
From: Natalia Levshina [natalevs at gmail.com]
Subject: New Perspectives on Communicative Efficiency

Full Title: New Perspectives on Communicative Efficiency 

Date: 07-Aug-2023 - 11-Aug-2023
Location: Düsseldorf, Germany 
Contact Person: Natalia Levshina
Meeting Email: natalevs at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 10-Oct-2022 

Meeting Description:

Convenors: Natalia Levshina & Anita Slonimska (MPI for Psycholinguistics,
Nijmegen)

Communicative efficiency has been a prominent theme in linguistics and
cognitive science (Hawkins 2004; Gibson et al. 2019; Levshina & Moran 2021).
It is argued that language users try to communicate efficiently, saving time
and effort while making sure that they transfer the intended message
successfully. Examples of efficient linguistic behaviour include the negative
correlation between the length of referential expressions and accessibility of
their referents (Ariel 1990; Arnold 2010), omission of unimportant or
predictable arguments (Goldberg 2005; Givón 2017), phonological reduction of
predictable units (Aylett & Turk 2004; Cohen Priva 2008; Seyfarth 2014),
Zipf’s law of abbreviation (Zipf 1935; Piantadosi, Tily & Gibson 2011),
omission of complementizers and relativizers in predictable contexts (Jaeger
2010; Wasow et al. 2011), minimization of domains and syntactic dependencies
(Hawkins 2004; Ferrer-i-Cancho 2006; Liu 2008; Futrell, Mahowald & Gibson
2015), diverse markedness phenomena (Kurumada & Grimm 2019; Haspelmath 2021),
and many, many others.

Despite this wealth of evidence and ideas, there remain a lot of open
questions and challenges. First of all, how do efficient strategies, as well
as costs and benefits of communication vary across different modalities? Are
the main principles guiding efficient behaviour by users of spoken languages
applicable to signed languages and co-speech gestures (cf. Napoli, Sanders &
Wright 2014; Grzyb, Frank & Vigliocco 2022)? Although there are some studies
addressing these questions (in particular, Slominska, Özyürek & Capirci
[2020]) on the efficiency of simultaneous encoding of complex events in signed
languages), this area requires more attention.

Secondly, accessibility, predictability and similar parameters have been
usually quantified based on textual data - from absolute and relative corpus
frequencies (Zipf 1935; Haspelmath & Karjus 2017) to information-theoretic
measures (Cohen Priva 2008; Piantadosi, Tily & Gibson 2011; Koplenig 2021).
Which of the quantitative measures represent accessibility of units the best
and under which conditions, is an open question (Meylan & Griffiths 2021;
Koplenig, Kupietz & Wolfer 2022; Levshina 2022). Moreover, other sources of
accessibility, such as extralinguistic context, are usually excluded for
practical reasons. There have been promising studies showing how to quantify
expectations based on encyclopaedic knowledge of everyday’s frames and
scenarios (e.g., Venhuizen, Crocker & Brower 2019), but this task remains a
challenge. 

Other pertinent questions include the following: 
How much cognitive and articulation effort is actually needed for successful
communication, given that processing and production are only “good enough”,
and somehow people still manage to interact (Ferreira 2003; Goldberg &
Ferreira 2022)?
How much rational Gricean reasoning and theory of mind is involved in
efficient behaviour (cf. Frank & Goodman 2012; Sikos et al. 2021; Turnbull
2019)? 
How does efficiency in production and processing interact with learnability of
language patterns by children and adult learners? What is the impact of
communicative efficiency and learnability on conventionalization and
obligatorification of language patterns?
How to test the bias towards efficient behaviour experimentally? What is the
role of interaction and other factors (cf. Fedzechkina, Jaeger & Newport 2012;
Smith & Culbertson 2019)?

Call for Papers:

We invite contributions that address different issues related to communicative
efficiency from an empirical and cognitive perspective. Our aim is to provide
an interdisciplinary forum for linguists, cognitive scientists and other
experts for a fruitful exchange of new ideas and diverse perspectives.

If you are interested, please send a short abstract (100 words, exclusive of
references) with the authors’ names and affiliations to Natalia Levshina
(natalevs at gmail.com) and Anita Slonimska (Anita.Slonimska at mpi.nl) before
October 10.

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-2826	
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