Compositionality and the lexicon in evolutionary semantics
Formal semantics has shown that sentence meanings arise by recursively composing lexical meanings, yet much of the literature on semantic universals models either lexicons with fixed signal structures or holistic composition without interpretable lexical parts. We introduce a framework that integrates this fundamental insight of formal semantics in evolutionary modeling, by allowing lexical meanings and a composition function to co-evolve under pressures for conceptual simplicity and communicative accuracy. We apply this framework to the evolution of quantificational meaning. Analyzing the Pareto frontier, we find that the most well-known semantic universal, conservativity, emerges as an ...
| Authors | Fausto Carcassi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 25 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 September 2026 |
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