An example of a functional pressure is the fact that in most languages, prepositions with less semantic content are shorter than prepositions with more content, as in the contrast between, say, ‘to’ or ‘at’ vs ‘about’ or ‘beyond’. An example of efficiency in information transfer is seen in the fact that less frequent words are more predictable in their shape than those speakers use more frequently. So the verb ‘bequeath’, as a less-frequent verb, has a simple conjugation: ‘I bequeath’, ‘you bequeath’, ‘she bequeaths’, ‘we bequeath’ and ‘everyone bequeaths’ (this general principle is known as
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