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Abstract

Semantic categories in the world's languages appear to reflect both universal conceptual tendencies and linguistic convention. We argue that this mixed picture may be accounted for in terms of near-optimal partitions of semantic space - that is, partitions that near-maximize the dispersion of categories. We examine cross-language variation in the naming of categories from two semantic domains - color and space - and show that in both cases this notion of near-optimality accounts for universal tendencies while also accommodating some observed cross-language variation. This is joint work with