Despite their diversity, languages around the world share a consistent set of properties and distributional regularities. For example, the distribution of word frequencies, the distribution of syntactic dependency lengths, and the presence of ambiguity are all remarkably consistent across languages. We discuss a framework for studying how these system‐level properties emerge from local, in‐the‐moment interactions of rational, pragmatic speakers and listeners. To do so, we derive a novel objective function for measuring the communicative efficiency of linguistic systems in terms of the interactions of speakers and listeners. We examine the behavior of this objective in a series of simulations focusing on the communicative function of ambiguity in language. These simulations suggest that rational pragmatic agents will produce communicatively efficient systems and that interactions between such agents provide a framework for examining efficient properties of language structure and use more broadly.

中文翻译：

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理性的，务实的主体的相互作用导致有效的语言结构和使用。

尽管语言多种多样，但世界各地的语言具有一致的属性和分布规律。例如，单词频率的分布，句法依存长度的分布以及歧义的存在在所有语言中都非常一致。我们讨论了一个框架，用于研究这些系统级属性如何从理性，务实的说话者和听众的局部，瞬间互动中产生。为此，我们得出了一个新颖的目标函数，用于根据说话人和听众的互动来衡量语言系统的沟通效率。我们在一系列针对语言歧义性的交流功能的模拟中研究了这一目标的行为。