Looking at the way different linguistic communities speak about a universally shared domain of experience raises questions that are central to the language sciences. How can we compare meaning across languages? What is the interaction between language, thought, and perception? Does linguistic diversity entail linguistic relativism? The literature on the naming systems of the body across languages have addressed these questions with little consensus. In the present study, we contribute to this debate with a comparison of body part terms in French, Indonesian, and Japanese. Using an updated version of the body coloring task, we observed both diversity and cross-linguistically shared patterns. Importantly, we also observed that speakers of languages which violate the wrist/ankle joint boundary rule do not collapse the distinction in thought. This key finding goes against the conflation of language and thought and leads us to conclude that linguistic diversity does not entail linguistic relativism. Methodologically, we advocate for the use of a culturally neutral etic space as a necessary tool in semantic typology. Theoretically, we propose that language is a multilevel phenomenon, which results from the interaction of non-linguistic and cross-culturally shared embodied motivations, context-specific situated language use, and culturally specific sedimented linguistic conventions.
In the conventional study of lexical semantics, adjectives are not considered likely to have a hierarchical relation, such as a meronymic (part-whole) relation, to each other. The most possible lexical relations among adjectives are antonymy and synonymy. In this study, however, I assume that meronomic relations between internal members of dimensional adjectives (e. g. big, long, deep) are conceptually possible from an ontological point of view. By using a semantic task, i. e. anaphora resolution, I draw the following conclusion: dimensional adjectives themselves have no meronymic relation to each other. However, restricting our discussion to the usage of Swedish dimensional adjectives in modifying concrete entities, the conceptual relations between the general term, e. g. BIG,1I use capital letters to indicate concepts throughout this essay. Lexical items are written in italics. and specific terms, e. g. LONG, DEEP, are mentally organized in a part-whole relation and thus in a meronomic structure. When applied to the whole expression which is a concept of a big entity, such as BIG CUP, there are meronomic relations between concepts of the big entity and its parts, e. g. BIG CUP – DEEP CUP.
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