Principles of semantic and functional efficiency in grammatical patterning

Abstract

Grammatical features such as number and gender serve two central functions in human languages. While they encode salient semantic attributes like numerosity and animacy, they also offload sentence processing cost by predictably linking words together via grammatical agreement. Grammars exhibit consistent organizational patterns across diverse languages, invariably rooted in a semantic foundation-a widely confirmed but still theoretically unexplained phenomenon. To explain the basis of universal grammatical patterns, we unify two fundamental properties of grammar, semantic encoding and agreement-based predictability, into a single information-theoretic objective under cognitive constraints, accounting for variable communicative need. Our analyses reveal that grammatical organization provably inherits from perceptual attributes, and our measurements on a diverse language sample show that grammars prioritize functional goals, promoting efficient language processing over semantic encoding.