Crosslinguistic research on domains including kinship, color, folk biology, number, and spatial relations has documented the different ways in which languages carve up the world into named categories. Although word meanings vary widely across languages, unrelated languages often have words with similar or identical meanings, and many logically possible meanings are never observed. We review research suggesting that this pattern of constrained variation is explained in part by the need for words to support efficient communication. This research includes several recent studies that have formalized efficient communication in computational terms and a larger set of studies, both classic and recent, that do not explicitly appeal to efficient communication but are nevertheless consistent with this notion. The efficient communication framework has implications for the relationship between language and culture and for theories of language change, and we draw out some of these connections.

中文翻译：

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语义类型学和有效沟通

对包括亲属关系，肤色，民间生物学，数量和空间关系在内的领域进行的跨语言研究已经证明了语言将世界划分为命名类别的不同方式。尽管不同语言之间的词义差异很大，但不相关的语言通常会使用具有相似或相同意思的词，并且从没有观察到许多逻辑上可能的意思。我们回顾研究表明，这种受约束的变异模式在一定程度上是由于需要用词来支持有效的交流来解释的。这项研究包括几项最近的研究，这些研究已经在计算上形式化了有效的交流，还有大量的经典和近期研究，虽然没有明确地呼吁有效的交流，但是仍然与这一概念保持一致。