"Game Theory" article on the importance of Stress in Communication by Presh Talwalkar

The sentence “I never said she stole my money” can have 7 different meanings depending on which word you stress. The explicit meanings and possible explanation for why this evolved are below. The potential meanings
I never said she stole my money – the claim wasn’t made by me
I never said she stole my money – I never made the claim
I never said she stole my money – I didn’t utter the claim out loud
I never said she stole my money – possibly someone else stole the money
I never said she stole my money – it could have been a gift
I never said she stole my money – the money was someone else’s
I never said she stole my money – she possibly stole something else
If you consider that multiple words could be stressed, then we have even more meanings. As each word can be stressed or not, there could be as many as 27 = 128 possible ways to stress the sentence, each with slightly different meanings. Why would language develop so that words are ambiguous and defined by context? One possible explanation is fleshed out in a linguistics paper that explains the game between listener and speaker: To understand why ambiguity makes a language more efficient rather than less so, think about the competing desires of the speaker and the listener. The speaker is interested in conveying as much as possible with the fewest possible words, while the listener is aiming to get a complete and specific understanding of what the speaker is trying to say. But as the researchers write, it is “cognitively cheaper” to have the listener infer certain things from the context than to have the speaker spend time on longer and more complicated utterances. The result is a system that skews toward ambiguity, reusing the “easiest” words. Once context is considered, it’s clear that “ambiguity is actually something you would want in the communication system,” Piantadosi says. It seems ambiguity makes for a more efficient language to communicate between two speakers. Here is a link to the full paper: The communicative function of ambiguity in language