Semantic chaining and efficient communication: The case of container names

Semantic categories in the world’s languages often reflect a historical process of chaining: A name for one idea is extended to a conceptually related idea, and from there on to other ideas, producing a chain of concepts that all bear the same name. The beginning and end points of such a chain might in principle be conceptually rather dissimilar. There is also evidence supporting a contrasting picture: Languages tend to support efficient, informative communication, often through semantic categories in which all exemplars are similar. Here, we explore this tension through computational analyses of existing crosslanguage naming and sorting data from the domain of household containers. We find: (1) formal evidence for historical semantic chaining, and (2) evidence that systems of categories in this domain nonetheless support near-optimally efficient communication. Our results suggest that semantic chaining may be constrained by the functional need for efficient, informative communication.