Cover not available
Article published In:
New Questions for the Next Decade
Edited by Gonia Jarema, Gary Libben and Victor Kuperman
[The Mental Lexicon 11:3] 2016
► pp. 429–466

Functionalism in the lexicon

Where is it, and how did it get there?

| University of Connecticut
Why do languages have the words they have, and not some other set of words? While certainly there is some arbitrariness in the lexicon (English ‘frog’ vs. Spanish ‘rana’), there is just as surely some systematicity or functionality in it as well. What exactly might the nature of this systematicity or functionality be? For example, might the lexicon be efficiently adapted for communication, learning, memory storage, retrieval, or other cognitive functions? This paper critically reviews evidence that natural language lexicons efficiently carve up semantic fields (e.g., color, space, kinship) and have phonological forms that are similarly efficient when the aggregate lexicon is considered. The paper also suggests additional ways functionalism in lexicons might be assessed, and speculates on how functional lexicons may have arisen.
Keywords: lexicon, functionalism, categorization, cultural evolution
Published online: 31 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.11.3.05ric
References (106)
Atran, S. (1995). Classifying nature across cultures. In E.E. Smith & D.N. Osherson (Eds.), Thinking: An invitation to cognitive science (vol. 31, pp. 131–174). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baronchelli, A., Gong, T., Puglisi, A., & Loreto, V. (2010). Modeling the emergence of universality in color naming patterns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(6), 2403–2407. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Battaglia, P.W., Hamrick, J.B., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2013). Simulation as an engine of physical scene understanding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(45), 18327–18332. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beach, L.R. (1964). Cue probabilism and inference behavior. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 78(5–6), 1. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berlin B., Kay P. (1969). Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological classification: Principles of categorization of plants and animals in traditional societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blei, D.M. (2012). Probabilistic topic models. Communications of the ACM, 55(4), 77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bortfeld, H., Morgan, J., Golinkoff, R.M., & Rathbun, K. (2005). Mommy and me: Familiar names help launch babies into speech-stream segmentation. Psychological Science, 16(4), 298–304. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boster, J. (2005). Emotion categories across languages. In H. Cohen & C. LeFebvre (Eds.), Handbook of categorization in cognitive science (pp. 187–222). Amsterdam: Elsevier. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bowerman, M., & Pederson, E. (1992). Cross-linguistic studies of spatial semantic organization. In Annual report of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (pp. 53–56).Google Scholar
Brashears, M.E. (2013). Humans use compression heuristics to improve the recall of social networks. Scientific Reports, 3, 1513. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brentari, D., & Coppola, M. (2013). What sign language creation teaches us about language. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 4(2), 201–211. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J.L., Pagliuca, W., & Perkins, R.D. (1990). On the asymmetries in the affixation of grammatical material. In W. Croft, K. Denning, & S. Kemmer (Eds.), Studies in typology and diachrony: Papers presented to Joseph H. Greenberg on his 75th birthday (pp. 1–42). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (1999). Usage-based phonology. In M. Darnell, E. Moravcsik, F. Newmeyer, M. Noonan, & K. Wheatley (Eds.), Functionalism and formalism in linguistics, Volume I: General papers (pp. 211–242). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2006). From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language, 82(4), 711–733. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Caramazza, A., & Mahon, B.Z. (2003). The organization of conceptual knowledge: the evidence from category-specific semantic deficits. Trends in cognitive sciences, 7(8), 354–361. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carstensen, A., Xu, J., Smith, C.T., & Regier, T. (2015). Language evolution in the lab tends toward informative communication. In D.C. Noelle, R. Dale, A.S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C.D. Jennings, & P.P. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Casasanto, D., & Lupyan, G. (2015). All concepts are ad hoc concepts. In E. Margolis & S. Laurence (Eds.), Concepts: New directions (pp. 543–566). Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Corter, J.E., & Gluck, M.A. (1992). Explaining basic categories: Feature predictability and information. Psychological Bulletin, 111(2), 291–303. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Croft, W. (1995). Autonomy and functionalist linguistics. Language, 71(3), 490–532. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2003). Typology and universals (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cutler, A., Hawkins, J.A., & Gilligan, G. (1986). The suffixing preference: A processing explanation. Linguistics, 231. 723–758.Google Scholar
de Boer, B. (2000). Self organization in vowel systems. Journal of Phonetics, 281, 441–465. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D.E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M.H., & Monaghan, P. (2015). Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(10), 603–615. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ferrer i Cancho, R., & Sole, R.V. (2003). Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100(3), 788–791. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ferrer-i-Cancho, R., & Moscoso del Prado Martín, F. (2011). Information content versus word length in random typing. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2011(12), L12002. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fowler, C.A., & Housum, J. (1987). Talkers’ signaling of “new” and “old” words in speech and listeners’ perception and use of the distinction. Journal of Memory and Language, 26(5), 489–504. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Galantucci, B., Garrod, S., & Roberts, G. (2012). Experimental semiotics. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6(8), 477–493. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gärdenfors, P. (2000). Conceptual spaces: The geometry of thought. MIT press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garner, W.R. (1974). The processing of information and structure. Potomac, MD: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Giavazzi, M. (2010). The phonetics of metrical prominence and its consequences for segmental phonology. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Graff, P. (2012). Communicative efficiency in the lexicon. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Griffiths, T.L., Steyvers, M., & Firl, A. (2007). Google and the mind: Predicting fluency with Pagerank. Psychological Science, 18(12), 1069–1076. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Griffiths, T.L., Steyvers, M., & Tenenbaum, J.B.T. (2007). Topics in semantic representation. Psychological Review, 114(2), 211–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Griffiths, T.L., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2006). Optimal predictions in everyday cognition. Psychological Science, 171, 767–773. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, M. (1999). Optimality and diachronic adaptation. Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft, 18(2), 180–205.Google Scholar
. (2003). The geometry of grammatical meaning: Semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison. In M. Tomasello (Ed.), The new psychology of language (vol. 21, pp. 211–242). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hills, T., Maouene, M., & Maouene, J. Sheya, A., & Smith, L. (2009a). Longitudinal analysis of early semantic networks preferential attachment or preferential acquisition? Psychological Science, 20(6), 729–739. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hills, T., Maouene, M., Maouene, J., Sheya, A., & Smith, L. (2009b). Categorical structure among shared features in networks of early-learned nouns. Cognition, 1121, 381–396. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hurford, J.R. (2003). Why synonymy is rare: Fitness is in the speaker. In W. Banzhaf, T. Christaller, P. Dittrich, J.T. Kim, & J. Ziegler (Eds.), Advances in artificial life– Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL), lecture notes in artificial intelligence (vol. 28011, pp. 442). Berlin: Springer Verlag.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T.F., & Tily, H. (2011). On language “utility”: processing complexity and communicative efficiency. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2(3), 323–335. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kemp, C., & Regier, T. (2012). Kinship categories across languages reflect general communicative principles. Science, 336(6084), 1049–1054. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Khetarpal, N., Majid, A., & Regier, T. (2009). Spatial terms reflect near-optimal spatial categories. In N. Taatgen, et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Khetarpal, N., Neveu, G., Majid, A., Michael, L., & Regier, T. (2013). Spatial terms across languages support near-optimal communication: Evidence from Peruvian Amazonia, and computational analyses. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
King, R. (1967). Functional load and sound change. Language 431, 831–852. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kirby, S., Cornish, H., & Smith, K. (2008). Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: an experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(31), 10681–10686. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kirby, S., Dowman, M., & Griffiths, T.L. (2007). Innateness and culture in the evolution of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(12), 5241–5245. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kleinberg, J.M. (2000). Navigation in a small world. Nature, 406(6798), 845. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kurumada, C., Meylan, S.C., & Frank, M.C. (2013). Zipfian frequency distributions facilitate word segmentation in context. Cognition, 1271, 439–453. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Landauer, T.K., Foltz, P.W., & Laham, D. (1998). An introduction to latent semantic analysis. Discourse Processes, 25(2–3), 259–284. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lelu, A. (2014). Jean-Baptiste Estoup and the origins of Zipf s law: A stenographer with a scientific mind (1868–1950). BEIO, Boletín de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, 30(1), 66–77.Google Scholar
Lindblom, B. (1986). Phonetic universals in vowel systems. In John Ohala & Jeri Jaeger (Eds.), Experimental phonology (pp. 13–44). Orlando: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Loreto, V., Mukherjee, A., & Tria, F. (2012). On the origin of the hierarchy of color names. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(18), 6819–6824. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mahowald, K., Fedorenko, E., Piantadosi, S.T., & Gibson, E. (2013). Info/information theory: speakers choose shorter words in predictive contexts. Cognition, 126(2), 313–318. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Majid, A., & Burenhult, N. (2014). Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language. Cognition, 130(2), 266–270. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Majid, A., Enfield, N.J., & van Staden, M. (2006). Parts of the body: Cross-linguistic categorisation (Special Issue). Language Sciences, 281(2–3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Malt, B.C., Sloman, S.A., Gennari, S., Shi, M., & Wang, Y. (1999). Knowing versus naming: Similarity and the linguistic categorization of artifacts. Journal of Memory and Language, 401, 230–262. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marcus, G.F., & Davis, E. (2013). How robust are probabilistic models of higher-level cognition? Psychological Science, 24(12), 2351–2360. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Margolis, E., & Laurence, S. (2014). Concepts. In E.N. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition). Retrieved from <[URL]>.Google Scholar
Markman, E.M., & Wachtel, G.F. (1988). Children’s use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words. Cognitive psychology, 20(2), 121–157. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, A. 2007. The evolving Lexicon. PhD Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Martinet, A. (1952). Function, structure, and sound change. Word, 81, 1–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, G.A. (1957). Some effects of intermittent silence. The American Journal of Psychology, 70(2), 311–314. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moscoso del Prado Martin, F. (2013). The missing baselines in arguments for the optimal efficiency of languages. Csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu, 1032–1037. Retrieved from [URL]Google Scholar
Murphy, G. (2002). The big book of concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Newman, M.E. (2002). Assortative mixing in networks. Physical review letters, 89(20), 208701. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Piantadosi, S.T. (2014). Zipf’s word frequency law in natural language: A critical review and future directions. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Piantadosi, S.T., Tily, H., & Gibson, E. (2011). Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(9), 3526–3529. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2012). The communicative function of ambiguity in language. Cognition, 122(3), 280–291. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Piantadosi, S.T., Tily, H.J., & Gibson, E. (2009). The communicative lexicon hypothesis. In Proceedings of the 31st annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2582–2587).
Piantadosi, S., Tily, H., & Gibson, E. (2013). Information content versus word length in natural language: A reply to Ferrer-i-Cancho and Moscoso del Prado Martin (2011). arXiv Preprint arXiv:1307.6726, 2011, 1–8. Retrieved from [URL]Google Scholar
Posner, M.I., & Keele, S.W. (1968). On the genesis of abstract ideas. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 771, 353–363. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (1970). Retention of abstract ideas. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 831, 304–308. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reed, K. (1972). Pattern recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 4071, 382–407. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Regier, T., Kay, P., & Khetarpal, N. (2007). Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(4), 1436–1441. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Regier, T., Kemp, C., & Kay, P. (2015). Word meanings across languages support efficient communication. In B. MacWhinney & W.O. Grady (Eds.), The handbook of language emergence (pp. 237–263). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Richie, R., Kaufmann, S., & Tabor, W. (2014). An LSA-based method for estimating word meaning specificity: An application to an account of Zipf’s Law. Poster presented at the 9th annual Mental Lexicon Conference , Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada.
Roberson, D., Davies, I., & Davidoff, J. (2000). Color categories are not universal: Replications and new evidence from a stone-age culture. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1291, 369–398. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roberson, D., Davidoff, J., Davies, I.R.L., & Shapiro, L.R. (2005). Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis. Cognitive Psychology, 501, 378–411. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosch, E. (1973). On the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories. In T.E. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Rosch, E., Simpson, C., & Miller, R.S. (1976). Structural bases of typicality effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 491–502. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B.B. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and categorization. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Reprinted in: Margolis, E. and Laurence, S. (Eds.) (1999). Concepts: Core readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sagi, E., Kaufmann, S., & Clark, B. (2011). Tracing semantic change with latent semantic analysis. In K. Allan & J.A. Robinson (Eds.), Current methods in historical semantics (pp. 161–183). Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scott-Phillips, T.C., & Kirby, S. (2010). Language evolution in the laboratory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(9), 411–417. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scott-Phillips, T.C., Dickins, T.E., & West, S.A. (2011). Evolutionary theory and the ultimate–proximate distinction in the human behavioral sciences. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 38–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silvey, C., Kirby, S., & Smith, K. (2013). Communication leads to the emergence of sub-optimal category structures. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1312–1317). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Steels, L., & Belpaeme, T. (2005). Coordinating perceptually grounded categories through language: A case study for colour. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(4), 469–489; discussion 489–529. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steels, L. (2011). Modeling the cultural evolution of language. Physics of Life Reviews, 8(4), 339–356. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steyvers, M., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2005). The large-scale structure of semantic networks: Statistical analyses and a model of semantic growth. Cognitive Science, 29(1), 41–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, B., Silvey, C., Kirby, S., & Smith, K. (2014). The effect of communication on category structure. In E.A. Cartmill, S. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Cornish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (EVOLANG10). Singapore: World Scientific. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, G.W., & Kello, C.T. (2014). Walking across Wikipedia: A scale-free network model of semantic memory retrieval. Frontiers in Psychology, 51, 86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, D. (1917). On growth and form. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vitevitch, M.S., Chan, K.Y., & Goldstein, R. (2014). Insights into failed lexical retrieval from network science. Cognitive Psychology, 681, 1–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wedel, A., Jackson, S., & Kaplan, A. (2013). Functional load and the lexicon: Evidence that syntactic category and frequency relationships in minimal lemma pairs predict the loss of phoneme contrasts in language change. Language and Speech, 56(3), 395–417. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wedel, A., Kaplan, A., & Jackson, S. (2013). High functional load inhibits phonological contrast loss: a corpus study. Cognition, 128(2), 179–186. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wittgenstein, L. (1921/1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.Google Scholar
. (1953/2010). Philosophical investigations. Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Wnuk, E., & Majid, A. (2014). Revisiting the limits of language: The odor lexicon of Maniq. Cognition, 131(1), 125–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Xu, J., Dowman, M., & Griffiths, T. (2013). Cultural transmission results in convergence towards colour term universals. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2801, 1758. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Xu, Y., & Regier, T. (2014). Numeral systems across languages support efficient communication: From approximate numerosity to recursion. In P. Bello et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Xu, Y., & Kemp, C. (2015) A computational evaluation of two laws of semantic change. In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A.S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C.D. Jennings, & P.P. Maglio (Eds.), 37th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Xu, Y., Regier, T., & Malt, B.C. (2015), Historical semantic chaining and efficient communication: The case of container names. Cognitive Science. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yee, E., & Thompson-Schill, S.L. (2016). Putting concepts into context. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(4), 1015–1027. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zipf, G. (1949). Human behavior and the principle of least effort. New York: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Zuidema, W., & Westermann, G. (2003). Evolution of an optimal lexicon under constraints from embodiment. Artificial Life, 1–14.Google Scholar
Zwarts, J. (1995). The semantics of relative position. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory , 51, 405–422.
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Sun, Yue & David Poeppel
2023. Syllables and their beginnings have a special role in the mental lexicon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120:36 DOI logo
Carr, Jon W., Kenny Smith, Jennifer Culbertson & Simon Kirby
2020. Simplicity and informativeness in semantic category systems. Cognition 202 ► pp. 104289 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.