Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication

Why do languages have the semantic categories they do? Each language partitions human experience into a system of semantic categories, labeled by words or morphemes, which are used to communicate about experience. These categories often differ widely across languages. Thus, languages do not merely provide different labels for the same universally shared set of categories—instead, both the labels and the categories themselves may be to some extent language-specific. However this cross-language variation is constrained. Words with similar or identical meanings often appear in unrelated languages, and most logically possible meanings are unattested—suggesting that there are universal forces constraining the cross-language diversity. Accounting for this pattern of wide but constrained variation is a central theoretical challenge in understanding why languages have the particular forms they do.