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We conduct a large-scale study of online community variation in language. We show that factors of efficient communication, which have been shown to drive crosslinguistic variation in lexical semantic systems, also play a role in within-language variation across 1926 English-language Reddit communities. We study variation in stancetaking behaviour, a domain where efficient communication may be influenced by social motivations for language use. We find that communities indeed have efficient stancetaking systems, particularly with respect to their own communicative needs. However, contrasting with crosslinguistic work, we find that communities are often not optimized for their needs. Moreover, we find that community-level social factors correlate with how optimized they are. These results highlight the importance of accounting for social pressures for language use when studying how efficient communication drives variation.

Work has shown that greater need to refer to a semantic domain drives greater lexical precision within that domain, both across languages, and in lexical choice in (within-language) dyadic interactions. We complement this, studying the relation between communicative need and precision across communities of speakers of the same language. Taking kinship as our domain, we find evidence that differences in communicative need between communities within a language contribute to variation in lexical precision in use. We show that this variation is partly due to differences in the kinds of pragmatic contexts the communities talk about, but that community variation in lexical precision exists over and above the factors we study, suggesting that more work is needed to elucidate additional pragmatic influences on the simplicity--informativity trade-off.

Language is inherently flexible: people continually generalize over observed data to produce creative linguistic expressions. This process is constrained by a wide range of factors, whose interaction is not fully understood. We present a novel study of the creative use of verb constructions ``in the wild'', in a very large social media corpus. Our first experiment confirms on this large-scale data the important interaction of category variability and item similarity within creative extensions in actual language use. Our second experiment confirms the novel hypothesis that low-frequency exemplars may play a role in generalization by signaling the area of semantic space where creative coinages occur.

Conversational interaction involves integrating the perspectives of multiple interlocutors with varying knowledge and beliefs. An issue that has received little attention in cognitive modeling of pragmatics is how speakers deal with the choice of words like come that are inherently perspectival. How do such lexical perspectival items fit into a speaker's overall integration of conversational perspective? We present new experimental results on production of perspectival words, in which speakers have varying degrees of certainty about their addressee's perspective. We show that the Multiple Perspectives Model closely fits the empirical data, lending support to the hypothesis that use of perspectival words can be naturally accommodated as a type of conversational perspective taking.

A key challenge for children in language acquisition is to learnthe mapping of words to mental categories, since this mappingvaries greatly from language to language. The errors childrenmake in this process are very informative regarding the devel-opment of lexical semantic categories; in particular, how chil-dren overextend a word to an inappropriate exemplar providesa window onto the mechanisms that underlie their categoriza-tion processes. We perform a large-scale quantitative analysisof the detailed patterns of children’s errors in the domain ofcolor, finding evidence that these error patterns are driven byan interaction between domain general principles of catego-rization, and children’s developing knowledge of the seman-tics of color. Our results suggest that, while domain generalprocesses play a role throughout development, their influencevaries across ages according to their use of domain specific(conceptual) knowledge, which gradually increases over time.

Looking to Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) sites and traditional ecological knowledge-based infrastructures (Lo–TEK), we find nature-based systems that symbiotically work with the environment. This article suggests that by hybridizing Lo–TEK with high-tech systems, the GIAHS sites could offer designers a toolkit towards economically, ecologically, culturally, and technologically innovative systems that can improve productivity and resilience. Whereas urban development results in the erasure of history, identity, culture and nature, this idea explores how urbanization can be an agent for the migration and reapplication of agricultural heritage systems, rather than their greatest threat. Cities can leap-frog the typical Western model of displacing indigenous diversity for homogenous high-tech. Instead, catalyzing localized, agricultural heritage landscapes like those designated as globally important agricultural heritage systems, as scalable, productive and resilient climate change solutions and technologies. It requires a shift in the thinking about traditional agriculture and about the relationship to Nature, from superior to symbiotic.

We present a novel statistical analysis of color categorizationusing a standard method from semantic typology. Our ap-proach shows that crosslinguistic color naming data exhibitslatent dimensions whose order of relative importance matchesthe evolutionary ordering of emergence of those distinctions.Moreover, we show that the importance ordering of these di-mensions holds even when controlling for frequency of the dis-tinctions by looking at languages within each stage of evolu-tion. Additionally, we find that the extreme points of the latentcolor dimensions correspond well to a small set of “univer-sal” focal colors. Thus we show that a simple mathematicalmethod simultaneously derives a consistent match both to theevolutionary stages and to the universal foci.

Patterns of crosslinguistic variation in the expression of wordmeaning are informative about semantic organization, but mostmethods to study this are labor intensive and obscure the gra-dient nature of concepts. We propose an automatic method forextracting crosslinguistic co-categorization patterns from par-allel texts, and explore the properties of the data as a potentialsource for automatically creating semantic representations forcognitive modeling. We focus on indefinite pronouns, com-paring our findings against a study based on secondary sources(Haspelmath 1997). We show that using automatic methods onparallel texts contributes to more cognitively-plausible seman-tic representations for a domain.

I guess the Germans moved on and I didn't. --MIRIAM KATIN, Letting It Go Comics memoirs have the 'potential... to open up new and troubled spaces,' as Gillian Whitlock has [...]