  It has been argued that semantic categories across languages reflect pressure
for efficient communication. Recently, this idea has been cast in terms of a
general information-theoretic principle of efficiency, the Information
Bottleneck (IB) principle, and it has been shown that this principle accounts
for the emergence and evolution of named color categories across languages,
including soft structure and patterns of inconsistent naming. However, it is
not yet clear to what extent this account generalizes to semantic domains other
than color. Here we show that it generalizes to two qualitatively different
semantic domains: names for containers, and for animals. First, we show that
container naming in Dutch and French is near-optimal in the IB sense, and that
IB broadly accounts for soft categories and inconsistent naming patterns in
both languages. Second, we show that a hierarchy of animal categories derived
from IB captures cross-linguistic tendencies in the growth of animal
taxonomies. Taken together, these findings suggest that fundamental
information-theoretic principles of efficient coding may shape semantic
categories across languages and across domains.
