DOI

DOI

The paper outlines the basics of data collection, analysis and visualization under the frame-based approach to lexical typology and illustrates its methodology using the data of cross-linguistic research on verbs of falling. The framework reveals several challenges to semantic map modelling that usually escape researchers’ attention. These are: (1) principles of establishing lexical comparative concepts; (2) the effective ways of visualization for the opposition between direct and figurative meanings of lexical items; (3) the problem of the borderlines between semantic fields, which seem to be very subtle. These problems are discussed in detail in the paper, as well as possible theoretical decisions and semantic modelling techniques that could overcome these bottlenecks.

The chapter outlines the goals of our project, points out the aspects that distinguish the vocabulary of qualities from other lexical domains, when viewed from a typological perspective, and introduces the methods of data collection and analysis we use in this project and in other related studies. It goes on to discuss the semantic parameters that motivate the lexical oppositions in various qualitative domains.

The article studies the domain of wetness in 20 languages. In many of them the domain features two main words (e.g. German nass, feucht; Mongolian nojton, čijgleg; Moksha načkə, l’et’kə) and the difference between them tends to be described in terms of degree, i.e. ‘intensely’ versus ‘slightly wet’. Typological analysis shows that in each case the degree of humidity receives a specific interpretation depending on the noun that is being modified, so that the choice of a particular synonym is based not simply on the quantity of the fluid, but on the situation as a whole (including the source of moisture, intentional versus non-intentional event, etc.). We also discuss the additional factors relevant to the domain in the languages that have more than two words in it, that is, the additional words with a positive or a negative connotation, or moisture from contact with a liquid versus moisture absorbed from humid air.

The paper presents a methodology for automatic construction of lexical typological questionnaires for qualitative semantic domains (e.g. sharp, straight, thick, or smooth). Our algorithm is based on data from a monolingual corpus; it constructs a list of collocations for the corresponding lexemes, computes a vector representation for every collocation, clusters the vector space into semantically homogeneous groups and extracts the three central elements from every cluster. We compare the resulting questionnaires against test data from the semantic domains that are already well studied manually. The algorithm demonstrates high quality results and can be used in the practice of lexical typological research.

The article compares the qualities ‘sharp’ and ‘blunt’ in 20 languages. We show that they tend to be unequal, with bluntness being negatively defined through sharpness. The two main oppositions in the domain are 1) the type of sharp object, and 2) the sense through which the quality is primarily experienced. The first opposition divides objects into bladed (knives etc) and pointed (needles etc), the second deals with touch vs. vision and translates to function (sharp/blunt instruments etc) vs. shape (pointed/rounded features etc).

This paper investigates the semantics of hiding in Adyghe from a typological perspective. There are four verb stems: ʁebəλə– ‘to hide’, wəχʷəme- ‘to protect, to cover up’, wəŝefə- ‘to conceal’, and xeḳʷ ečʼ̣ e– ‘to mix, to blend in’. The central verb of the field, ʁebəλə- ‘to hide’, describes situations where the object is put somewhere to be out of sight (e.g. ‘to hide money into the safe’). It combines with the same locative affixes as standard verbs of motion do. In current usage, the verb wəχʷəme- stands for ‘to protect’, whereas the locative prefix čẹ – ‘under’ changes its meaning to ‘to cover up, to hide’ (e.g. ‘to get the picture covered in dust’). The verb wəŝefə- ‘to conceal’ denotes a specific, “passive” mode of hiding, the primary goal of which is to keep the object secret (e.g. ‘to conceal the income from the taxation authorities’). And the verb xeḳ ʷečʼ̣ e- ‘to mix, to blend in’ expresses the idea of hiding something amongst multiple entities (e.g. ‘to disappear into the crowd’). As is shown, the combinability of these four verbs with certain affixes, including locatives, is highly determined by their lexical meaning. The research serves to clarify the semantics of several verb stems and locative affixes in Adyghe and is considered to contribute to the general typology of hiding.

This paper investigates the use of the Russian verb padat’ ‘to fall’ and its quasi-synonyms. Padat’ is dominant in the system of Russian predicates of falling — and therefore should be suitable for describing any type of uncontrolled downward motion. However, in a number of contexts a different means of expression is required. These contexts are not easily detected because they normally render the meanings which are peripheral in the semantic domain of falling. In this study, we attempt to find such contexts with the help of the Russian Learner Corpus, which contains texts produced by heritage speakers and learners of Russian with various dominant languages. The corpus enables search by error tags and gives valuable data for the analysis of learners’ interlanguage. Lexical and grammatical violations found in the free production of foreign learners of Russian are used to uncover cases where the dominant verb padat’ ‘to fall’ yields to its quasi-synonymous counterparts. In this paper we are aiming at detecting specific limitations in the distribution of the dominant lexeme and, based on the data coming from the Russian Learner Corpus (for this study examples from learners dominant in English and Korean are taken), we focus on the initial point of the falling motion, precipitation subframe and aspectual characteristics of the dominant verb upast’ and its quasi-synonym vypast’. The latter issue is investigated through the scope effect that the verbs of falling demonstrate in combination with the Russian proximative adverb počti ‘almost’. For each case we give a possible explanation of the learner’s error and make an attempt to establish the rules of standard Russian that make the use of the dominant lexeme unacceptable. The results of the study significantly contribute to typological analysis of dominant systems across languages and have implications for synchronic and diachronic studies of domain lexemes

Questionnaires constitute a crucial tool in linguistic typology and language description. By nature, a Questionnaire is both an instrument and a result of typological work: its purpose is to help the study of a particular phenomenon cross-linguistically or in a particular language, but the creation of a Questionnaire is in turn based on the analysis of cross-linguistic data. We attempt to alleviate linguists’ work by constructing lexical Questionnaires automatically prior to any manual analysis. A convenient Questionnaire format for revealing fine-grained semantic distinctions includes pairings of words with diagnostic contexts that trigger different lexicalizations across languages. Our method to construct this type of a Questionnaire relies on distributional vector representations of words and phrases which serve as input to a clustering algorithm. As an output, our system produces a compact prototype Questionnaire for cross-linguistic exploration of contextual equivalents of lexical items, with groups of three homogeneous contexts illustrating each usage. We provide examples of automatically generated Questionnaires based on 100 frequent adjectives of Russian, including veselyj ‘funny’, ploxoj ‘bad’, dobryj ‘kind’, bystryj ‘quick’, ogromnyj ‘huge’, krasnyj ‘red’, byvšij ‘former’ etc. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the Questionnaires confirms the viability of our method.

The article examines the relationship between time and space in language on the basis of adjectives denoting high or low speed in Russian and other (mostly Slavic) languages. In physics, the notion of speed is defined in terms of time and space (distance per time unit). It is argued, however, that speed in natural language is a primarily temporal concept involving the comparison of the temporal properties of a ‘target situation’ with those of a ‘norm’. Speed terms are shown to develop their own metaphors and metonymies, subsequently becoming connectors and intensifying markers. This argument has important theoretical implications insofar as it demonstrates that the domain of time is less dependent on space than the traditional view might indicate.

The paper examines the properties of heavy as a perceptual concept, based on evidence from 11 languages. We demonstrate that the semantics of this concept is heterogeneous; lexemes of this field can be used in situations of at least three types: Lifting, Shifting and Weighing. These situations are either lexicalised as separate words or they converge in a single lexeme in various combinations following certain strategies. We also argue that different metaphorical extensions correspond to different situation types; this allows us to use analysis of metaphoric shifts as an additional instrument to establish the semantic structure of direct meanings.

The semantic domain of pain seems to be unique in that, crosslinguistically, it includes few predicates that are specifically dedicated to pain (like hurt or ache); instead, the major part of the field is constituted by lexical units drawn from other semantic domains, which are applied to pain through processes of semantic derivation (like my eyes are burning, my throat is scratching). After discussing methodological considerations concerning data collection, the article first analyzes the semantic sources for pain predicates and addresses the issue of their typological consistency, based on data from over 20 languages It is then demonstrated that the evolution of a pain meaning cannot be reduced to a merely semantic process, since the meaning shift may be accompanied by changes in the morphological, morphosyntactic and/or syntactic properties of the source verb. We suggest the term “re-branding” for the complex meaning changes of this kind and discuss their theoretical relation to the well-established notions of metaphor and metonymy.