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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.