Communicative Efficiency: Language Structure and Use
Natalia Levshina, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

All living beings try to save effort, and humans are no exception. In this talk I will shows how we save time and energy during communication by making efficient choices in grammar, lexicon and phonology. I present a synthesis of theoretical ideas and empirical evidence demonstrating that language is designed to be as efficient as possible, as a system of communication. My framework, which is based on three general pragmatic principles, accounts for the diverse manifestations of communicative efficiency across a different languages and relies on typological, corpus-based and experimental evidence.