The Lexical Typology of Semantic Shifts

Päivi Juvonen, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Päivi Juvonen, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110393064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm

1.“The lexical typology of semantic shifts”: An introduction

1.1Introducing the key notions: Semantic shift, motivation, semantic association, semantic parallel

Pervasiveness of polysemy and the fact that lexical meanings are subject to semantic change belong to linguists’ basic knowledge about the lexicon as a complex dynamic system. There is also a standard assumption that the two phenomena are interrelated in that a semantic change from one meaning to another usually involves a transitional stage where the two co-exist within one and the same polysemous lexeme (e.g. Sweetser 1990: 9; Blank 1999: 131; Evans and Wilkins 2000: 549; Traugott and Dasher 2002: 11). This, in turn, reflects speakers’ perception of the two concepts as closely related and, often, that one of them comes from, or is motivated by the other. The cover notion of semantic shift, as it is used here, refers to a pair of meanings A and B which are linked by some genetic relation, either diachronically (cf. Latin caput ‘head’ and French chef ‘chief’) or synchronically, e.g. as two meanings of a polysemous lexeme (cf. English head, as in I’ve hit my head, i.e. ‘top part of body’, and as in I’ve met my department head, i.e. ‘leader of others’) (cf. Zalizniak et al. 2012 and Newman 2015 for discussions of the notion of semantic shift). It is worth emphasizing that the term semantic shift (often used interchangeably with (semantic) extension) is understood panchronically, in spite of the possible dynamic connotations of its name. Another useful term in this connection is heterosemy, which refers to “cases (within a single language) where two or more meanings or functions that are historically related, in the sense of deriving from the same ultimate source, are borne by reflexes of the common source element that belong in different morphosyntactic categories” (Lichtenberk 1991: 476). To continue with the HEAD example, the pair head (like my head) and ahead (ahead of me) is an example of heterosemy.

Seen from another perspective, the same phenomena can be considered as examples of motivation: if we take a given word of a given language as a reference point and its meaning M1 as derived from another meaning, M2, the meaning M1 may be described as being motivated by the meaning M2, be it diachronic semantic evolution or synchronic polysemy. Motivation is understood here as a certain parallelism between a cognitively relevant conceptual relation between two lexical units, on the one hand, and a perceptible formal relation between the two, on the other hand (Koch 2001: 1156), i.e., a particular meaning-form correlation. In Koch’s terminology, the conceptual relation between ‘top part of body’ and ‘leader of others’ in our examples above is metaphorical similarity, which, on the formal side, is paralleled by formal identity between the two exponents in each of the two cases (apart from the more or less trivial diachronic differences between Latin and French). Motivation may of course involve other cognitive and formal relations between lexical units. To continue with Koch’s (2001) examples and terminology, the cognitive relation of contiguity between a tree and its fruit is expressed by the formal relation of compounding in the case of English pear-tree vs. pear, by formal identity (polysemy) in Russian (gruša for both), by gender alternation in Italian (pero M VS. pera F), by suffixation in French (poirier VS. poire), and by a lexicalized phrase in Sardinian (arbore di pira VS. pira, alongside pira for both). As the Sardinian example shows, motivation by polysemy and motivation by word-formation devices (including phrase formation) are not strictly opposed to each other in that one and the same language may combine both. The common denominator in all these cases is the form-meaning link between the words for PEAR TREE and PEAR FRUIT, which is often referred to by the cover term semantic association (e.g., Matisoff 2004; Vanhove [ed.] 2008; Urban 2012).

Different patterns of polysemy/heterosemy, semantic shifts and lexical motivation in general result from a complex interplay of universal cognitive processes and cultural/historical/linguistic variables. Some patterns are cross-linguistically frequent, i.e., have cross-linguistically frequent semantic parallels, e.g., the extension of ‘see’ and ‘hear’ verbs to ‘smell’ and ‘taste’ (Viberg 2001); others show a genetically and/or areally restricted distribution, e.g., the conflation of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ in many Papuan and Australian Aboriginal languages (Aikhenvald 2009), but also in a few other languages of the world (Vanhove [ed.] 2008). Still others are very local or even language-specific, as ‘beef’ expressed as ‘big meat’ in some of the languages of Hindukush – the mountainous region comprising northern Pakistan, north-eastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of Indian Kashmir, e.g. ɣəṭa ɣwaxa in Pashto, uyúm čhap in Burushaski, ghav masii in Indus Kohistani (Koptjevskaja-Tamm and Liljegren forthc.). It also seems that languages in general can differ both in the extent to which their lexicon is motivated as well as in the particular ways in which it is motivated (Kibrik 2012 ; Urban 2012).

1.2The main research traditions behind the volume: Cognitive semantics, lexical typology, historical and areal linguistics

This volume focuses on semantic shifts and motivation patterns in the lexicon seen cross-linguistically. It builds therefore on several research traditions – cognitive linguistics, lexical typology, historical and areal linguistics – and contributes to all of these.

Questions of polysemy and semantic shifts, and in particular universal metaphoric and metonymic processes, are, of course, a central concern of cognitive semantics, and the relevant knowledge accumulated within this theoretical framework is impressive (the literature too extensive to be listed here). The recent years have also seen a number of excellent cognitively oriented cross-linguistic publications concerned with semantic shifts (e.g., Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2006, 2008; Sharifian et al. [eds.] 2008; Maalej and Yu [eds.] 2011; Idström and Piirainen [eds.] 2012). However, cognitive semantics has on the whole operated with a relatively limited number of languages and has relatively modestly empirically-founded insights with regard to large-scale cross-linguistic semantic comparison (cf. e.g. van der Auwera and Nuyts 2007). A part of the reason for this has to do with methodological complications inherent in systematic cross-linguistic research on polysemy, metaphor and metonymy. To start with, the notion of polysemy and what counts as different senses is, of course, an extremely complicated matter. This is especially true for cognitive semantics, for which linguistic meanings always imply a certain construal of a particular situation (cf. Langacker 2015) and are laden with particular associations, intimately related to the speakers’ ‘world’ knowledge. In line with the general usage-based view within cognitive linguistics, the meanings of linguistic expressions are consequences of their uses, and word meanings are always associated with certain constructions. Conversely, conventional meanings associated with linguistic expressions only partially sanction the senses evoked in particular contexts. As a consequence, there are different opinions on what counts as polysemy both within cognitive linguistics and also among different semantic theories, practices (such as dictionary entries) and language users (see Riemer 2005 and Gries 2015). Turning to metaphor and metonymy, there are on-going intensive debates within cognitive semantics about the level of generalisations in proposed metaphorical and metonymical shifts (e.g., A THEORY IS A BUILDING VS. ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE) and debates about semantic shifts seen as possible transformations on the underlying image schema. In addition, Conceptual Metaphor Theory emphasizes conceptual association that does not boil down to individual metaphorical uses or to linguistic convention. But to quote Gibbs (2015: 183),

cognitive linguists, and others, should articulate criteria for identifying metaphoric patterns in language and inferring specific conceptual metaphors from discourse. These procedures should be specified with sufficient detail so that other researchers can possibly replicate the analysis and emerge with similar conclusions.

Translated into the methodology of systematic cross-linguistic research, this means that we can only test the extent to which some concrete manifestations of suggested metaphors hold (e.g., whether verbs for seeing are systematically extended to perception, or whether words for ‘warm’ are systematically extended to emotions), rather than whether the conceptual metaphors KNOWING IS SEEING OR AFFECTION IS WARMTH as a whole are universal.

Questions of universality vs. specificity of linguistic phenomena (specificity to particular languages, to areally and/or to genetically related languages) are central to modern typological research. Systematic study of cross-linguistic variation in words and vocabularies, i.e. typological research on lexicon (lexical typology) has until recently been relatively modest, as opposed to grammatical and phonetic typology with their impressive progress in the recent decades (Koch 2001; Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2008; Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Vanhove, and Koch 2007). Fortunately, interest in lexical-typological issues has been on the rise during recent years, as witnessed by an impressive flow of new publications. A large portion of this research can be characterized as “onomasiological lexical typology”, or domain-categorization lexical typology, dealing with how languages cut up a particular cognitive domain among their (lexical) expressions – e.g., BODY (Majid, Enfield, and van Staden [eds.] 2006), CUT and BREAK (Majid and Bowerman 2007), LOCATION (Ameka and Levinson [eds.] 2007), PUT and TAKE (Narasimhan and Kopecka [eds.] 2012) etc. The main themes of the present volume, i.e. what different meanings can be expressed by one and the same lexeme or by lexemes that are related to them synchronically and/or diachronically, belong within “semasiological lexical typology”. Some of the important recent publications here (often combining the onomasiological and semasiological perspectives) concern GIVING; SITTING, STANDING and LYING; and EATING and DRINKING (Newman [ed.] 1997, 2002, 2009), pain (Reznikova, Rakhilina, and Bonch-Osmolovskaya 2012), BODY (Mihatsch and Dvořák 2004; Koch 2008; Steinberg 2015), PERCEPTION (Vanhove 2008), AQUA-MOTION (Maisak and Rakhilina [eds.] 2007), and TEMPERATURE (Koptjevskaja-Tamm [ed.] 2015). The probably most significant large-scale investigations of cross-linguistically recurrent semantic associations are reported in Urban (2012, also 2009 and 2010; see also Blust 2011 for a reply to Urban 2010).

It is important to emphasize that systematic cross-linguistic comparison is dependent on comparable data coming from (many) different languages. Cross-linguistic identification of studied phenomena presupposes a procedure which ensures that we compare like with like. However, another key concern for cross-linguistic and typological research is to find a reasonable level of abstraction, at which the language-specific details can be reduced to manageable patterns. The two concerns interact in various ways, and what counts as “like and like” is often dependent on the research object and goal. Crucially, cross-linguistic identification of phenomena should involve theory-neutral or framework-neutral definitions and concern “observable phenomena that pattern interestingly in the world’s languages” (Nichols 2007: 231). Translated into the phenomena studied in this volume, this means, among other things, a fairly pragmatic stance on what counts as meaning/sense and/or semantic shift. A useful notion in this connection is François’ (2008: 180) colexification, i.e., association of two or more functionally distinct senses with the same lexical form, whereby “functionally distinct senses” are identified as senses that are expressed by different lexemes in other languages. The notion of colexification allows the researcher to ignore issues of polysemy, vagueness of meanings etc.

Diachronic change and synchronic polysemy/heterosemy/motivational patterns of linguistic units have long been thought by linguists to represent two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Many important studies discuss particular universal vs. genetically and/or areally restricted motivational patterns and stress their relevance for reconstructing semantic shifts – e.g., Matisoff (1978) for Tibeto-Burman languages, Yavorska (1992) for Slavic and Germanic, Evans (1992) and Evans and Wilkins (2000) for Australian languages, Enfield (2003) for SE Asian languages, Epps (2013) for the Amazonian languages, François (2010) for the Oceanic languages, Vanhove (ed.) (2008) for many different languages, and Wilkins (1996) and Koch (2008) in general (cf. also Heine and Kuteva 2002 on semantic shifts involved in grammaticalization). For at least two linguistic areas, lexico-semantic parallels have been systematically used as areality indicators, i.e., pointing to the network of prolonged linguistic contacts – the Meso-American (Smith-Stark 1994; Brown 2011) and the Ethio-Eritrean (Hayward 1991, 2000) languages. The works by Urban (2012, also 2009 and 2010) mentioned above are extremely important in this connection. The following two enterprises directed at unveiling cross-linguistically recurrent patterns of semantic associations deserve special mention (see Koptjevskaja-Tamm and Liljegren forthc. for an overview and discussion of lexico-semantic parallels in areal studies):

1)The Catalogue of Semantic Shifts in the Languages of the World (http://semshifts.iling-ran.ru/) at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow is a searchable computer database (not yet fully implemented online) that currently contains more than 3000 semantic shifts found in 319 languages (Zalizniak 2008, Zalizniak et al. 2012).

2)CLICS: Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (List et al. 2014, http://clics.lingpy.org/main.php) is an online database of colexifications in 221 languages. It is based on four different freely available online resources an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 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
• Endnotes