While it is known that speakers tend to use more reduced forms for more predictable words or phrases, it is unclear whether the same happens at the referential level: the influence of referent predictability on pronoun production remains a contentious issue, with divergent findings reported in the literature. To address this inconsistency, we carried out a Bayesian meta-analysis of the current literature on the relationship between referent predictability and pronoun production. Our meta-analysis covers twenty primary peer-reviewed studies, encompassing twenty-six experiments across eight languages. We find stronger evidence for a small positive effect of referent predictability on pronoun usage, as opposed to the alternative hypothesis of no effect or a negative effect. As the first comprehensive synthesis of available evidence on this topic, our study offers insights into pronoun production and identifies promising avenues for future research: focus on typologically diverse languages, on conditions where a variety of referring expressions are expected or where the effect of predictability is more likely to appear, and others. Finally, we also advocate for the use of meta-analysis as a tool for theoretical linguistics.

Previous studies have proposed that the lexicalization of perception verbs is constrained by a biologically grounded hierarchy of the senses. Other research traditions emphasize conceptual and communicative factors instead. Drawing on a balanced sample of perception verb lexicons in 100 languages, we found that vision tends to be lexicalized with a dedicated verb, but that nonvisual modalities do not conform to the predictions of the sense-modality hierarchy. We also found strong asymmetries in which sensory meanings colexify. Rather than a universal hierarchy of the senses, we suggest that two domain-general constraints—conceptual similarity and communicative need—interact to shape lexicalization patterns.

This article investigates the role of situational context in differential case marking. Evidence from conversation data in Korean demonstrates that caseless subjects are predominantly found in event-reporting clauses that have an agent directly identifiable in the here and now, while case-marked subjects are not similarly restricted. Based on this evidence, I propose a new account of differential subject marking in terms of an efficiency principle of negative correlation between length/complexity and cue reliability. I argue that the association of caseless subjects with seemingly unrelated features such as grounding in the here and now, nonstativity, and definiteness follows from speakers' efficient use of case marking motivated by the availability of strong situational cues to the intended role interpretation of a subject referent.

The distribution of labials and coronals within Spanish CVCVCV words and English and Dutch CVCVC words has been studied from a functional perspective and in fine detail. We argue that word recognition is key in the explanation of the results; as a word is pronounced, an increasing number of word candidates is eliminated, and consequently the beginning of the word has a higher communicative load than the more predictable end. We argue that this explains the favouring of labials at the beginning of the word and (some) coronals at the end. A novel finding in this study is that lexical stress is a relevant factor in the distribution of the studied consonants. A possible explanation is that stress plays a role in the elimination word candidates. In Spanish, English, and Dutch discourse, the majority of words begins with a stressed syllable and, therefore, an unstressed initial syllable eliminates more word candidates and the communicative load is reduced more, which affects the distribution of labials and (some) coronals.

Meanings communicated with depictions constitute an integral part of how speakers and signers actually use language (Clark, 2016). Recent studies have argued that, in sign languages, depicting strategy like constructed action (CA), in which a signer enacts the referent, is used for referential purposes in narratives. Here, we tested the referential function of CA in a more controlled experimental setting and outside narrative context. Given the iconic properties of CA we hypothesized that this strategy could be used for efficient information transmission. Thus, we asked if use of CA increased with the increase in the information required to be communicated. Twenty-three deaf signers of LIS described unconnected images, which varied in the amount of information represented, to another player in a director–matcher game. Results revealed that participants used CA to communicate core information about the images and also increased the use of CA as images became informatively denser. The findings show that iconic features of CA can be used for referential function in addition to its depictive function outside narrative context and to achieve communicative efficiency.

Cross-linguistic generalizations about grammatical contexts favoring syncretism often have an implicational form. This paper shows that this is expected if (i) morphological paradigms are required to be both as small and as unambiguous as possible, (ii) languages may prioritize these requirements differently, and (iii) probability distributions for grammatical features interacting in syncretic patterns are fixed across languages. More specifically, this approach predicts that grammatical contexts that are less probable or more informative about a target grammatical feature $ T $ should favor syncretism of $ T $ cross-linguistically. The paper provides evidence for these predictions based on four detailed case studies involving well-known patterns of contextual syncretism (gender syncretism based on number, gender syncretism based on person, aspect syncretism based on tense, and case syncretism based on animacy).

Recent proposals hold that the cognitive systems underlying language production exhibit computational properties that facilitate communicative efficiency, i.e., an efficient trade-off between production ease and robust information transmission. We contribute to the cross-linguistic evaluation of the communicative efficiency hypothesis by investigating speakers’ preferences in the production of a typologically rare head-marking alternation that occurs in relative clause constructions in Yucatec Maya. In a sentence recall study, we find that speakers of Yucatec Maya prefer to use reduced forms of relative clause verbs when the relative clause is more contextually expected. This result is consistent with communicative efficiency and thus supports its typological generalizability. We compare two types of cue to the presence of a relative clause, pragmatic cues previously investigated in other languages and a highly predictive morphosyntactic cue specific to Yucatec. We find that Yucatec speakers’ preferences for a reduced verb form are primarily conditioned on the more informative cue. This demonstrates the role of both general principles of language production and their language-specific realizations.