This paper deals with the typology of surface texture expressions, such as a slippery road, a smooth wooden board, rough hands, coarse or rough fabric. We discuss both their direct uses and metaphors formed with them, such as a slippery person, a smooth speech, a rugged captain. Our language sample includes 10 Uralic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Mari, Erzya, Moksha, Udmurt, Komi-Zyrjan, Hungarian, Khanty, Nenets), as well as 5 languages from other families (Russian, English, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean). The categorisation of these attributes includes primarily the division into visually perceived surfaces and surfaces perceived through physical contact. We discuss how much and in what ways the antonymic areas under observation are asymmetrical in their semantic features and combinability. One more focus in this research is to evaluate texture lexicon variation in an intragenetic study of a group of related languages in comparison with its variation across a broader sample of languages.

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.

In this paper, we present an application for formal concept analysis (FCA) by showing how it can help construct a semantic map for a lexical typological study. We show that FCA captures typological regularities, so that concept lattices automatically built from linguistic data appear to be even more informative than traditional semantic maps. While sometimes this informativeness causes unreadability of a map, in other cases, it opens up new perspectives in the field, such as the opportunity to analyze the relationship between direct and figurative lexical meanings.

The paper presents a study in lexical typology. We focus on the semantic domain of pain as one of the most universal and complex areas of human experience. The predicates of unpleasant bodily sensations are compared in a sample of 23 languages. The collected material demonstrates that the use of pain verbs is dependent on the range of factors of different nature. This data heterogeneity poses the problem of cross-linguistic comparability of pain predicates. As a way to overcome this problem, we propose the construction of a typological database. The multidimensional classifications implemented in the database allow for various cross-linguistic generalizations on pain and human body conceptualizations as well as on regularities of semantic shifts in different languages.

This paper elaborates on an approach to the cross-linguistic comparison of lexical (sub)systems, which is based on the differentiation of typologically relevant semantic domains. We illustrate this approach exploring the conceptualization of motion / being in liquid medium (aqua-motion), within which four general domains (SWIMMING, SAILING, DRIFTING and FLOATING) are recognized. Using this distinction, we propose a typology of aqua-motion systems that distinguishes between ‘rich’, ‘poor’ and ‘middle’ systems of aqua-motion expressions depending on the lexical contrasts that the language displays.

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.