Efficient Communication in Word Formation: How Syntactic and Lexical Surprisal Jointly Shape English Conversion Over...

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Language Change

Background:

• Conversion degree in English has significantly increased over the last century.
• This trend presents a paradox, favoring speaker economy (ease of articulation) over listener economy (potential ambiguity).
• Efficient communication theory suggests ambiguous forms are permissible in predictable contexts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the communicative paradox of increasing English conversion.
• To test the hypothesis that contextual predictability licenses ambiguous word forms.
• To analyze the role of syntactic and lexical predictability in the rise of conversion.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of 639 noun-to-verb and 443 verb-to-noun conversion words from 1920s to 2010s.
• Application of generalized linear mixed models.
• Surprisal estimation using local 5-grams, syntactic POS-grams, and GPT-2.

Main Results:

• The rise in conversion degree correlates with increasingly predictable linguistic contexts.
• Contextual predictability compensates for the lack of explicit morphological marking.
• Syntactic and lexical surprisal independently inhibit conversion, but interact positively, suggesting resource competition.

Conclusions:

• English conversion evolution is a dynamic optimization, not random drift.
• Language change reflects a negotiation between communicative efficiency and cognitive resource limitations.
• Provides an information-theoretic perspective on language evolution and efficient communication.