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SUMMARY:The discriminative nature of human communication - Dr Michael Rams
 car (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
DTSTART:20170126T160000Z
DTEND:20170126T173000Z
UID:TALK70703@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Theodora Alexopoulou
DESCRIPTION:Information theory has shown that exponential distributions ar
 e beneficial to the design of efficient communication systems\, because th
 ey are both optimal for coding purposes and memoryless. It has recently be
 en shown that family names in two Sinosphere languages are exponentially d
 istributed\, and I will show how consistent with this\, the empirical dist
 ributions of names -- and other classes of lexical items -- that English s
 peakers and hearers engage with in moment to moment communication are expo
 nential.  I will illustrate the detailed workings of the communicative pro
 cess that this distributional structure supports by presenting a full acco
 unt of the incremental\, discriminative syntactic and semantic properties 
 of personal names. I will further show that the distributional structures 
 supporting this process are universal to the world’s major languages\, a
 nd that the Zipfian distributions long thought to play a functional role i
 n language are an artifact of the mixing of these empirical distributions.
  Finally I will describe the implications that the phenomena identified he
 re have for theoretical understandings of human communication and cognitio
 n.
LOCATION:GR06/07\, English Faculty Building\, 9 West Road\, Sidgwick Site
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