The lecture by Dr Michael Ramscar from the University of Tübingen will be held at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (nám. Jana Palacha 1/2, Prague 1, room P026), on 22 June 2026 at 11:00–12:30.

Seen from a traditional perspective, the functions of many of the features that are often found in human communicative codes – highly skewed lexical distributions, irregular forms, grammatical gender – have often seemed obscure. In this talk, Dr Ramscar will discuss how, seen from an information theoretic perspective – in which we treat human communication as process of uncertainty reduction based on predictive codes – the functions of these and many other parts of linguistic codes seem both clear and well adapted. He will discuss how the functions of forms within predictive codes is largely determined by their frequency: high frequency forms (which are a minority of types), which are known to all, tend to be arbitrary and informative, whereas low frequency forms (the majority of types) have to be predictable in context (inferable). Dr Ramscar will illustrate these principles in relation to aspects of the grammar that are typically ignored in functional analysis of language, personal names and grammatical gender.

You can join the lecture online. Please write to doc. Jan Chromý (jan.chromy@ff.cuni.cz) for the lecture’s link and passcode.

You may see the invitation here.