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<p>Many thanks to Temuulen Khishigsuren for pointing to this
important line of work!</p>
<p>There is actually earlier work by Witold Mańczak (1966; 1970),
who proposed a general law which I called "Mańczak's Law of
Differentiation":</p>
<p><b>Frequently used linguistic elements are generally more
differentiated.</b></p>
<p>I first became aware of this as a possible highly general law
after reading Regier et al.'s 2016 paper about snow/ice
differentiation
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0151138">https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0151138</a>):
Languages whose speakers frequently talk about snow and ice lexify
these two concepts, whereas circum-equatorial languages tend to
say things like 'soft snice' and 'hard snice'. (Incidentally,
Charles Kemp is one of the authors of this paper as well, so it
seems to come from the same tradition as Khishigsuren's work.)<br>
</p>
<p>But what explains the association between high frequency of use
and lexification (i.e. expression as an atomic morph)? In a 2024
talk in Poznań (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://zenodo.org/records/10958622">https://zenodo.org/records/10958622</a>), I elaborated
on the idea that this has to do with the restriction on root
length: Roots cannot be too long (not longer than 2-3 syllables),
so when a meaning is rare, it cannot be expressed by a single root
– in other words, it cannot be (easily) lexified.</p>
<p>It might be that this also partially explains the lexification
patterns observed with antonymy by Koptjevskaja-Tamm et al. (2024)
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2023-0140/html">https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2023-0140/html</a>).
The authors say (in §5):<br>
</p>
<p><font size="2">"since the best examples of antonymic pairs ... in
our questionnaire belong to the most frequently occurring
property concepts, it is not surprising that both of their
members tend to be lexicalized [= lexified, M.H.] as plain
forms. From this point of view, we would therefore expect to
encounter neg-derived expression across languages in antonym
pairs for the less frequent concepts"</font></p>
<p>Best,</p>
<p>Martin<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 05.02.25 23:45, Temuulen
Khishigsuren via Lingtyp wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAPWuCghiusseQqnDmhgeaogfx1Gj35tPLz3rmqeSpjXN3ceF3g@mail.gmail.com">
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<div dir="ltr"
style="font-size:small;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial">Dear
Masha and all,<br>
<br>
Thanks for sharing these thoughts about lexicalization. Along
with collaborators I've recently developed a project testing
the hypothesis that frequency influences lexicalization (ie
the idea that Martin proposed). Our results suggest that
frequency predicts lexicalization better than do other
potential predictors such as concreteness.<br>
<br>
An initial write up is here:<br>
<br>
Khishigsuren et al. 2025. Usage frequency predicts
lexicalization across languages (preprint:<span> </span><a
href="https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fqdjv_v1"
rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"
style="color:rgb(17,85,204);box-sizing:border-box;text-decoration:underline;word-break:break-word;font-family:"Open Sans","Helvetica Neue",sans-serif;font-size:14px"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fqdjv_v1</a><span> </span>)<br>
<br>
I'd love to consider "cognitive complexity" as an alternative
predictor but am not sure how this might be operationalized. I
do consider age of acquisition, which seems related to
complexity, but these two variables are not quite the same. If
anyone has thoughts about the best way to measure complexity,
please let me know.</div>
<div dir="ltr"
style="font-size:small;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial"><br>
Best,<br>
Temuulen<br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr"
style="font-size:small;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial"><br>
</div>
<div
style="font-size:small;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial"><font
color="#666666">PhD candidate</font></div>
<div
style="font-size:small;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial"><font
color="#666666">Complex Human Data Hub</font></div>
<div
style="font-size:small;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial"><font
color="#666666">University of Melbourne</font></div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/">https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/</a></pre>
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