  A family of information theoretic models of communication was introduced more
than a decade ago to explain the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies.
The family is a based on a combination of two information theoretic principles:
maximization of mutual information between forms and meanings and minimization
of form entropy. The family also sheds light on the origins of three other
patterns: the principle of contrast, a related vocabulary learning bias and the
meaning-frequency law. Here two important components of the family, namely the
information theoretic principles and the energy function that combines them
linearly, are reviewed from the perspective of psycholinguistics, language
learning, information theory and synergetic linguistics. The minimization of
this linear function is linked to the problem of compression of standard
information theory and might be tuned by self-organization.
