Communicative need shapes choices to use gendered vs. gender-neutral kinship terms across online communities.

Julia Watson, Sarah Walker, Suzanne Stevenson, Barend Beekhuizen

Abstract:

Work has shown that greater need to refer to a semantic domain
drives greater lexical precision within that domain, both across
languages, and in lexical choice in (within-language) dyadic
interactions. We complement this, studying the relation between communicative need and precision across communities
of speakers of the same language. Taking kinship as our domain, we find evidence that differences in communicative need
between communities within a language contribute to variation
in lexical precision in use. We show that this variation is partly
due to differences in the kinds of pragmatic contexts the communities talk about, but that community variation in lexical
precision exists over and above the factors we study, suggesting that more work is needed to elucidate additional pragmatic
influences on the simplicity–informativity trade-off.