Volume 26, Issue 2 - Special issue on areal typology of lexico-semantics; Issue Editors: Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Antoinette Schapper and Felix Ameka

The Hindu Kush, or the mountain region of northern Pakistan, north-eastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, is home to approximately 50 languages belonging to six different genera: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic and the isolate Burushaski. Areality research on this region is only in its early stages, and while its significance as a convergence area has been suggested by several scholars, only a few, primarily phonological and grammatical, features have been studied in a more systematic fashion. Cross-linguistic research in the realms of semantics and lexical organization has been given considerably less attention. However, preliminary findings indicate that features are geographically bundled with one another, across genera, in significant ways, displaying semantic areality on multiple levels throughout the region or in one or more of its sub-regions. The present study is an areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the region, in which particular attention is paid to a few notable polysemy patterns and what appears to be a significant geographical clustering of these. Comparisons are made between the geographical distribution of such patterns and those of some other linguistic features as well as with relevant non-linguistic factors related to shared cultural values or identities and a long history of small-scale cross-community interaction in different parts of the region.

Of all the semantic domains, colour terms have attracted the largest amount of attention, notably from a typological point of view. However, there is much more to be discovered. A search of the cross-linguistic lexical database of African languages (RefLex) reveals several previously undetected areal colexification patterns and shared lexico-constructional patterns in a genetically balanced sample of 401 languages. In this paper, we illustrate several areal characteristics of colour terms: (i) the spread of an areal feature due to a common extra-linguistic setting (locust bean – Parkia biglobosa  – as the lexical source of yellow ); (ii) two convergence phenomena, one based on a shared lexico-constructional pattern including a term for water , and one based on shared colexifications ( red and ripe vs. green and unripe ); and (iii) an areal pattern of lexical diffusion of colour ideophones, a category which has thus far been considered difficult to borrow.

Updating the methodology of Hayward, Richard J. 1991. A propos patterns of lexicalization in the Ethiopian language area. In Daniela Mendel & Ulrike Claudi (eds.), Ägypten im afroorientalischen Kontext. Special issue of Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere , 139–156. Cologne: Institute of African Studies, using the concept of colexification (François, Alexandre. 2008. Semantic maps and the typology of colexification: Intertwining polysemous networks across languages. In Martine Vanhove (ed.), Studies in language companion series , vol. 106, 163–215. Amsterdam: John Benjamins), this paper, for the first time, provides quantitative evidence that the languages of the West African Sahel/Savanna form a lexical-typological language area characterised by shared colexifications absent further north. It then uses the linguistic comparative method to determine how languages entering or leaving this area, or coming into increasing contact with it at its edges, have converged with their new neighbours within the past millennium. The results indicate sharp differences in the respective roles and rates of borrowing and calquing, with the latter acting almost exclusively to increase shared colexifications.

In this article I demonstrate that there is a pervasive lexico-semantic association bones are strength in the languages of Melanesia, but that its linguistic expression is highly varied; languages are scattered along a lexical-to-clausal cline in their expression of the association between bone and strength, with a large number of language-specific idioms based on the association to be observed in Melanesia. I argue that the striking areality of this lexico-semantic association is readily missed in top-down approaches to lexical semantic typology that rely, for instance, on databases of word lists, or on narrow search domains limited to the meanings of simplex lexemes.

On the basis of a sample of 424 languages or dialects, this article provides a typological-comparative investigation of designations for three major internal organs of the torso, the ‘heart’, the ‘liver’, and the ‘lungs’. While colexification patterns are relatively unconstrained, the data show a skewing in morphologically complex terms: ‘heart’ and ‘liver’ often serve as head nouns in complex terms for ‘lungs’, but the reverse is rare. Another recurrent phenomenon is that two of the organs –sometimes ‘heart’ and ‘lungs’, but more frequently ‘liver’ and ‘lungs’– share their head noun, and are distinguished from one another by modifiers that refer to their most salient characteristics, as in Azerbaijani aɣ ǯiyær ‘white ǯiyær’ = ‘lungs’ and gara-ǯiyær ‘black-ǯiyær’ = ‘liver’. Having thus set the typological stage, I move on to discuss two different regions of the world in which such terms for ‘lungs’ and ‘liver’ have spread through language contact. This has happened in Eurasia, where the abovementioned pattern, which I call “explicitly dyadic”, was brought from Turkish to vernaculars of the Balkans and, most likely through Azerbaijani influence, to languages of the Southern Caucasus. Similar explicitly dyadic terms, but based on a head noun meaning ‘heart’, also occur in the Andes, where they appear to have spread from Quechuan to Barbacoan languages. The evidence not only shows that ‘liver’ and ‘lungs’ form a “semantic dyad” in which designations make use of “opposed characteristics” in different regions of the world, but also that such designations are salient and therefore prone to spread in language contact situations.

As observed by Koptjevskaja-Tamm and Liljegren, the impact of language contact on grammatical typology is well recognized, but the field of lexico-semantic areal typology is still young. Here some mechanisms leading to an areal pattern are explored in the domain of certain sets of basic verbs in languages indigenous to the North American West. The patterns involve the apparent evocation, as part of the meanings of the common verbs, of certain features of the most immediately involved participant, particularly number, animacy, shape, and/or consistency. Two mechanisms apparently underlie the areal patterns. First, bilinguals accustomed to distinguishing such features lexically in verbs in one of their languages may simply choose more specific verbs in another language on a regular basis until, over time, original hyponyms come to be basic level terms. Second, shadows of compounding and derivation can be seen in some pairs of verbs in some languages. Patterns elsewhere in the language or in a neighbor can stimulate such formations and accelerate their lexicalization, ultimately blurring their internal structure and hastening their ascent to basic-level status.

This article investigates to what extent the semantics and the phonological forms of lexical items are genealogically inherited or acquired through language contact. We focus on patterns of colexification (the encoding of two concepts with the same word) as an aspect of lexical-semantic organization. We test two pairs of hypotheses. The first pair concerns the genealogical stability (persistence) and susceptibility to contact-induced change (diffusibility) of colexification patterns and phonological matter in the 40 most genealogically stable elements of the 100-items Swadesh list, which we call “nuclear vocabulary”. We hypothesize that colexification patterns are (a) less persistent, and (b) more diffusible, than the phonological form of nuclear vocabulary. The second pair of hypotheses concerns degrees of diffusibility in two different sections of the lexicon – “core vocabulary” (all 100 elements of the Swadesh list) and its complement (“non-core/peripheral vocabulary”). We hypothesize that the colexification patterns associated with core vocabulary are (a) more persistent, and (b) less diffusible, than colexification patterns associated with peripheral vocabulary. The four hypotheses are tested using the lexical-semantic data from the CLICS database and independently determined phonological dissimilarity measures. The hypothesis that colexification patterns are less persistent than the phonological matter of nuclear vocabulary receives clear support. The hypothesis that colexification patterns are more diffusible than phonological matter receives some support, but a significant difference can only be observed for unrelated languages. The hypothesis that colexification patterns involving core vocabulary are more genealogically stable than colexification patterns at the periphery of the lexicon cannot be confirmed, but the data seem to indicate a higher degree of diffusibility for colexification patterns at the periphery of the lexicon. While we regard the results of our study as valid, we emphasize the tentativeness of our conclusions and point out some limitations as well as desiderata for future research to enable a better understanding of the genealogical versus areal distribution of linguistic features.

This paper investigates universal and areal structures in the lexicon as manifested by colexification patterns in the semantic domains of perception and cognition, based on data from both small and large datasets. Using several methods, including weighted semantic maps, formal concept lattices, correlation analysis, and dimensionality reduction, we identify colexification patterns in the domains in question and evaluate the extent to which these patterns are specific to particular areas. This paper contributes to the methodology of investigating areal patterns in the lexicon, and identifies a number of cross-linguistic regularities and of area-specific properties in the structuring of lexicons.