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  1. Learnability and Semantic Universals.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld & Jakub Szymanik - forthcoming - Semantics and Pragmatics.
    One of the great successes of the application of generalized quantifiers to natural language has been the ability to formulate robust semantic universals. When such a universal is attested, the question arises as to the source of the universal. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that many semantic universals arise because expressions satisfying the universal are easier to learn than those that do not. While the idea that learnability explains universals is not new, explicit accounts of learning that can (...)
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  • Ease of learning explains semantic universals.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld & Jakub Szymanik - 2020 - Cognition 195:104076.
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  • Monotone Quantifiers Emerge via Iterated Learning.Fausto Carcassi, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld & Jakub Szymanik - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (8):e13027.
    Natural languages exhibit manysemantic universals, that is, properties of meaning shared across all languages. In this paper, we develop an explanation of one very prominent semantic universal, the monotonicity universal. While the existing work has shown that quantifiers satisfying the monotonicity universal are easier to learn, we provide a more complete explanation by considering the emergence of quantifiers from the perspective of cultural evolution. In particular, we show that quantifiers satisfy the monotonicity universal evolve reliably in an iterated learning paradigm (...)
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  • Contrafactives, Learnability, and Production.David Strohmaier & Simon Wimmer - 2025 - Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 3:395-410.
    No natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. Because factives are universal across natural languages, this means that there is a major asymmetry between contrafactives and factives. We previously hypothesised that this asymmetry arises partly because the meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. Here we test this hypothesis by using a production-oriented computational experiment that overcomes two limitations of our previous experiments. We find that our results do not support our previous hypothesis.
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  • Contrafactives and Learnability.Simon Wimmer & David Strohmaier - 2022 - In Marco Degano, Tom Roberts, Giorgio Sbardolini & Marieke Schouwstra, Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium. pp. 298-305.
    Richard Holton has drawn attention to a new semantic universal, according to which (almost) no natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. This semantic universal is part of an asymmetry between factive and contrafactive attitude verbs. Whilst factives are abundant, contrafactives are scarce. We propose that this asymmetry is partly due to a difference in learnability. The meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. We tested our hypothesis by conducting a computational experiment using an artificial neural (...)
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