Rational Communication Shapes Morphological Composition

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03510v1
• Date: Tue, 05 May 2026 08:44:23 GMT
• Title: Rational Communication Shapes Morphological Composition
• Abstract summary: We show that attested compositions are ranked above unattested alternatives generated from contemporaneously available morphemes.<n>These findings suggest that lexicalization reflects a communicative trade-off between vocabularies and efficiency.
• Score: 9.648894214024615
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining morphemes through compounding or affixation -- has rarely been modeled as a historically situated speaker choice among competing morpheme sequences, leaving unanswered why a language settles on one morpheme combination over other plausible alternatives. We ask whether a trade-off between listener recoverability and speaker production cost can predict attested compositions over contemporaneously available alternatives. Here we show, within the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework (Frank & Goodman, 2012; Goodman & Frank, 2016) using a time-indexed lexicon constructed from Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), that across 4323 naturally occurring English compounds and derivations spanning 1820--2019, attested compositions are systematically ranked above unattested alternatives generated from contemporaneously available morphemes. Models integrating semantic informativeness with production cost outperform semantic-only and cost-only baselines on Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and top-k accuracy (Acc@k), with the advantage of the Pragmatic Speaker model ($S_1$) over the semantic-only baseline growing as the candidate set expands, where meaning alone leaves morphological choice underdetermined. These findings suggest that lexicalization reflects a communicative trade-off between expressiveness and efficiency, extending rational accounts of communication from utterance-level choice to the internal structure of words.

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