The Lexical Typology of Semantic Shifts (Cognitive Linguistics Research) (Cognitive Linguistics Research [clr], 58)

The volume focuses on semantic shifts and motivation patterns in the lexicon. Its key feature is its lexico-typological orientation, i.e. a heavy emphasis on systematic cross-linguistic comparison. The book presents current theoretical and methodological trends in the study of semantic shifts and motivational patters based on an abundance of empirical findings across genetically, areally and typologically diverse languages. Table of contents 1. “The lexical typology of semantic shifts”: An introduction 2. Meaning change and semantic shifts 3. Semantic shifts as sources of enantiosemy 4. A Frame-based methodology for lexical typology 5. Corpus methods for the investigation of antonyms across languages 6. Studying colexification through massively parallell corpora 7. Polysemy in action: The Swedish verb slå ‘hit, strike, beat’ in a crosslinguistic perspective 8. Making do with minimal lexica. Light verb constructions with make/do in pidgin lexica 9. Extended uses of body-related temperature expressions 10. The semantic domain of emotion in Eskimo and neighbouring languages 11. Motivational scenarios and semantic frames for social relations in Slavic, Romance and Germanic languages – friends, enemies, and others 12. Tree, firewood and fire in the languages of Sahul 13. Investigating lexical motivation in French and Italian 14. Types of motivation in folk plant taxonomies 15. Differences and interactions between scientific and folk biological taxonomy 16. Holistic motivation: Systematization and application to the Cooking domain 17. Motivation by formally analyzable terms in a typological perspective: An assessment of the variation and steps towards explanation Subject index Language index Author index This article tackles a question raised by one of the founding figures of lexical typology, Stephen Ullmann: to what degree do languages differ in the extent to which they resort to morphologically analyzable lexical items? Drawing on a worldwide sample of 78 languages for which a standard set of 160 mostly nominal meanings is investigated, the article demonstrates that variability in this area is indeed profound. Correlations between the relative prevalence of analyzable items in a language with the size of its consonant inventory, the complexity of its syllable structure, and the length of its nominal roots suggest that, typologically, languages with a simple phonological structure are those in which analyzability in the lexicon is most profound. Possible explanations for this observation in terms of the avoidance of homonymy and pressure exerted by different linguistic subsystems on each other are discussed.