When speakers refer to objects in the world, they often overinform: provide their listener with redundant adjectival information. Contrary to classical theories in linguistics, recent theories have framed overinformativeness as an efficient means of …
Languages are more likely to have lexical items for some concepts (e.g. child) than others (e.g. parent). We propose that the communicative need of a concept influences how often it is lexicalized across languages, and test the hypothesis that usage …
Despite being ubiquitous in natural language, collocations (e.g., kick+habit) incur a unique processing cost, compared to compositional phrases (kick+door) and idioms (kick+bucket). We confirm this cost with behavioural data as well as MINERVA2, a …
Recently the principles of efficient communication have provided useful characterizations of semantic typology: the diversity of attested languages can be described by competing pressures for simplicity and informativeness. While this approach has …
Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus …
Collocations, semi-productive lexical combinations with one figurative and one literal word, are said to be a "pain in the neck" for researchers and L2 learners. The present study aims: (i) to conceptually replicate the processing costs incurred by …
Languages vary in the way they categorize semantic domains. Incidentally certain semantic systems appear more often than others across the world. Recent research has shown that the attested variability can be explained as the result of languages …
Over the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the US government to simplify public legal documents for the benefit of society at large. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of how effective these efforts--collectively …
Legal documents, in the form of terms of service agreements and other private contracts, are now an increasingly prevalent part of everyday life. While legal documents have long been acknowledged to be difficult to understand without training, it …
Grammatical features vary widely across languages and this variation has been studied in detail. The functions of grammatical features, however, are not entirely clear and a number of puzzles remain. For example, why do some languages have rich …