Areal typology of lexicon-semantics
Morpho-syntactic and phonological features are regularly used by linguists to establish the existence of linguistic areas and construct areally based typologies. By contrast, lexico-semantic phenomena have, with a few exceptions (e.g. Matisoff 2004, Enfield 2003, Smith-Stark 1994), received remarkably little attention from areal linguistics and areal typology, and little is known about the geographical variation they display. The talk will advance the discussion on lexico-semantic phenomena showing parallels across languages and how these similarities may be described and accounted for – by universal tendencies, genetic relations among the languages, their contacts and/or their common extra-linguistic surrounding.
The study of lexical phenomena is of course well-established in research on language contact. Areal lexico-semantics (Ameka & Wilkins 1996, Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Liljegren 2017), by contrast, is concerned not with the way words move from language to language, but with the diffusion of semantic features across language boundaries in a geographical area. In the talk we will primarily focus on the general organization of a lexical field, polysemy (colexification) patterns and lexical motivation, collocational patterns etc., keeping in mind that areal lexico-semantics is a potentially vast field, spanning the convergence of individual lexemes, through the structuring of entire semantic domains to the organization of complete lexicons.
Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm (Stockholm University) – October 25th 2017 (11-12.30 AM)
R100 (Place du 20-Août, 7, 2nd floor – 4000 Liège)