Despite their differences, the languages of the world share many deep features when it comes to how they express meaning. These semantic universals are likely to reflect shared aspects of human cognitive, communicative, and social structure. Recent advances in cross-linguistic semantics and computational linguistics allow us to develop explanations of the sources of such properties. This Element presents a body of work doing just that: we explicate a framework for providing computational explanations of semantic universals and then describe several such explanations using principles of ease of learning and efficient communication. Empirical domains include quantifiers, color terms, modals, and indefinites. After providing these explanations, we provide a discussion of future directions for advancing the explanatory power of computational methods in semantic typology.

翻译：暂无翻译