Compositionality and the lexicon in evolutionary semantics

2026-06-25

AI Summary

This study investigates how lexical meaning and compositional mechanisms co-evolve to give rise to semantic universals, such as conservativity in quantifiers. To this end, we propose an evolutionary semantics framework that, for the first time, integrates the recursive compositionality principle from formal semantics into a multi-objective optimization model. The system jointly evolves under dual pressures of conceptual simplicity and communicative accuracy. Through grammar-sensitive simulations and Pareto front analysis, the model successfully reproduces conservativity in quantifiers and reveals it as an emergent property of system-level efficient abstraction. This framework not only reconciles the learnability of quantifiers with existing evolutionary models but also offers a general modeling paradigm for phenomena such as global compression of grammatical categories and argument-specific semantic specialization.

Abstract

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 efficient system-wide abstraction. The account is sensitive to syntactic structure and helps reconcile tensions between empirical evidence on quantifier learnability and prior evolutionary models. More broadly, the results demonstrate that the picture of sentential meaning developed in formal semantics can be productively combined with evolutionary modeling. The framework offers a template for studying universals that involve global compression within a grammatical category, semantic specialization of syntactic arguments, and the co-evolution of lexical and compositional meaning.

Problem

• compositionality
• lexicon
• semantic universals
• conservativity
• evolutionary semantics

Innovation

• compositionality
• evolutionary semantics
• conservativity
• lexical meaning
• co-evolution