Cute Little Puppies and Nice Cold Beers: An Information Theoretic Analysis of Prenominal Adjectives

A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One longstanding puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender. In an information theoretic analysis of German noun classification, Dye et al. (2017) enumerated a number of important processing advantages gender confers. Yet this raises a further puzzle: If gender systems are so beneficial to processing, what does this mean for languages that make do without them? Here, we compare the communicative function of gender marking in German (a deterministic system) to that of prenominal adjectives in English (a probabilistic one), finding that despite their differences, both systems act to efficiently smooth information over discourse, making nouns more equally predictable in context. We examine why evolutionary pressures may favor one system over another, and discuss the implications for compositional accounts of meaning and Gricean principles of communication.