Universal and macro-areal patterns in the lexicon

Georgakopoulos, Athanasios; Grossman, Eitan; Nikolaev, Dmitry; Polis, Stéphane

doi:10.1515/lingty-2021-2088

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…More recently, digital lexical resources and parallel corpora have been increasingly used in lexical typology, enabling typologists to cover more languages and domains. For example, Viberg (2014)'s 50-language study on the perception domain was extended to 1,220 languages in Georgakopoulos et al (2021). A study of the color domain in 119 languages by Kay et al (2009) was leveraged in Mc-Carthy et al (2019), which managed to cover 2,491 languages.…”

Section: Untranslatability and Lexical Typologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Linguistic Typology to Enrich Multilingual Lexicons: the Case of Lexical Gaps in Kinship

Khishigsuren¹,

Bella²,

Batsuren³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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This paper describes a method to enrich lexical resources with content relating to linguistic diversity, based on knowledge from the field of lexical typology. We capture the phenomenon of diversity through the notions of lexical gap and language-specific word and use a systematic method to infer gaps semi-automatically on a large scale. As a first result obtained for the domain of kinship terminology, known to be very diverse throughout the world, we publish a lexico-semantic resource consisting of 198 domain concepts, 1,911 words, and 37,370 gaps covering 699 languages. We see potential in the use of resources such as ours for the improvement of a variety of cross-lingual NLP tasks, which we demonstrate through a downstream application for the evaluation of machine translation systems.

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Section: Untranslatability and Lexical Typologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Linguistic Typology to Enrich Multilingual Lexicons: the Case of Lexical Gaps in Kinship

Khishigsuren¹,

Bella²,

Batsuren³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…Sapi o also meant 'taste' in Latin, maybe even more prominently. Links between sensorial perception and understanding are similarly prominent and well known (see e.g Georgakopoulos et al 2022…”

mentioning

confidence: 94%

Short vs Long Stem Alternations in Romance Verbal Inflection: The S‐Morphome

Herce,

Cathcart

2023

Trans of the Philol Soc

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Some verbs in Romance (e.g. the reflexes of faciō ‘do’, dīcō ‘say’, habeō ‘have’, sapiō ‘know’, possum ‘be able’, and volō ‘want’) display alternations between a short (e.g. It. f‐are, f‐a, d‐ire) and a long (e.g. It. fac‐evo, dic‐e, dic‐evo) stem. This paper contains an exploration of the lexical and paradigmatic distribution of these stem alternations across Romance varieties to trace when they emerged, how and why. The results suggest a comparatively early emergence as a result of the interaction between preexisting morphological predictability relations within the paradigm and an evolutionary preference for shorter forms in high‐frequency word forms and lexemes.

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“…Previous studies on cross-linguistic polysemy have typically focused on a single semantic domain, limiting our understanding of cross-domain polysemy patterns. While questions about how languages distribute meanings across vocabularies have a long-standing tradition in linguistics and philosophy, global-scale studies have been restricted to domains such as body parts 9 , physical entities 10 , perception verbs 11 , time-related words 12 , and emotion words 13 . Although these studies examine universal and core semantic domains, they fail to capture the full range of human experience, which spans multiple domains that are often interconnected.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shared structure of fundamental human experience revealed by polysemy network of basic vocabularies across languages

Liang,

Xu,

Ran

2024

Sci Rep

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How are concepts related to fundamental human experiences organized within the human mind? Our insights are drawn from a semantic network created using the Cross-Linguistic Database of Polysemous Basic Vocabulary, which focuses on a broad range of senses extracted from dictionary entries. The database covers 60 basic vocabularies in 61 languages, providing 11,841 senses from 3736 entries, revealing cross-linguistic semantic connections through automatically generated weighted semantic maps. The network comprises 2941 nodes connected by 3573 edges. The nodes representing body parts, motions, and features closely related to human experience occupy wide fields or serve as crucial bridges across semantic domains in the network. The polysemous network of basic vocabularies across languages represents a shared cognitive network of fundamental human experiences, as these semantic connections should be conceived as generally independent of any specific language and are driven by universal characteristics of the real world as perceived by the human mind. The database holds the potential to contribute to research aimed at unraveling the nature of cognitive proximity.

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Universal and macro-areal patterns in the lexicon

Cited by 14 publications

References 53 publications

Using Linguistic Typology to Enrich Multilingual Lexicons: the Case of Lexical Gaps in Kinship

Using Linguistic Typology to Enrich Multilingual Lexicons: the Case of Lexical Gaps in Kinship

Short vs Long Stem Alternations in Romance Verbal Inflection: The S‐Morphome

Shared structure of fundamental human experience revealed by polysemy network of basic vocabularies across languages

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