28.4144, Review: Linguistic Theories; Semantics; Typology: Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Juvonen (2016)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4144. Tue Oct 10 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4144, Review: Linguistic Theories; Semantics; Typology: Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Juvonen (2016)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Clare Harshey <clare at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2017 15:48:25
From: Olivier Bondeelle [olivier.bondeelle at gmail.com]
Subject: The Lexical Typology of Semantic Shifts

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36282399


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-4030.html

EDITOR: Paeivi  Juvonen
EDITOR: Maria  Koptjevskaja-Tamm
TITLE: The Lexical Typology of Semantic Shifts
SERIES TITLE: Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Olivier Bondeelle, (personal interest - not currently working at a university)

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

PRESENTATION

“The Lexical Typology of Semantic Shifts”, edited by Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm
and Päivi Juvonen, considers the lexical typology of semantic shifts, which
can be defined roughly speaking as relations between multiple meanings for a
single lexical item, either diachronically or synchronically. The edited
volume is dedicated to Peter Koch (author of Chapter 2) who passed away in
2014.

SUMMARY

In Chapter 1 (“Introduction”), Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm situates the volume in
the research field of lexical typology. She starts by recalling the main
notions used in the volume, namely semantic shift or semantic extension,
motivation which offers a different perspective on semantic shift, and
semantic parallelisms which are recurrent cross-linguistic semantic shifts.
She then situates the chapters in three linguistic traditions, i.e. cognitive
semantics, lexical typology, and areal and historical linguistics. Finally,
she presents each paper after having specified that the volume is organized in
3 parts. Part 1 (Chapters 1 to 6) is devoted to theoretical and methodological
approaches in lexical typology. Part 2 (Chapters 7 to 12) covers
cross-linguistic studies on semantic shifts in different conceptual domains,
with a universal perspective, while Part 3 (Chapters 13 to 17) focuses on
motivation strategies.

In Chapter 2 (“Meaning Change and semantic shifts”) Peter Koch draws a
many-faceted portrait of semantic shifts from a diachronic perspective, in the
cognitive semantics tradition. He introduces various aspects of semantic
shifts. Among linguistic facts on semantic meaning change, the author
distinguishes meaning innovation and meaning change, speaker-induced change
and hearer-induced change. Among types of change, he discusses meaning
specialization vs meaning generalization, co-hyponomic transfer of meaning,
metonymic change vs metaphoric change, and contrast-based change. He finally
situates meaning change among other diachronic lexical processes such as
word-formation and borrowing, suggesting further research avenues to model
meaning change in its various aspects.

In Chapter 3 (“Semantic shifts as sources of enantiosemy”), Alexei Shmelev
focuses on semantic shifts closely related to enantiosemy (opposite meanings
within a single item). He argues that enantiosemy is rare in a strict sense,
but frequent in a broader sense. In a typological perspective, he takes into
account not only word pairs, but also grammatical morphemes and pairs of
phrases, in a single language or in a few languages from the same family. An
examination of Slavic language data reveals some regularities: meaning
opposition occurs in various “converse” pairs which refer to the same
situation (opposite participants, reverse processes, opposite results). This
leads Shmelev to conclude that regular semantic shifts are caused by pragmatic
(conventionalization) or discourse effects (irony) as well as cognitive
motivations (metaphor and metonymy).

In Chapter 4 (“A Frame-based methodology for lexical typology”), Ekaterina
Rakhilina and Tatiana Reznikova argue for a methodology especially designed
for lexical typology. The general principle comes from the Moscow semantics
school (Apresjan 2000) which claims that it is by comparing the lexico-grammar
of semantically linked words that the organization of lexical domains emerges.
Throughout the different steps described by the authors, words which have
similar profiles and which refer to the same situations are grouped in
“Frames” (different from Fillmore’s frame semantics) which structure lexical
domains. Cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical domains are represented on
semantic maps, where a Frame is represented by a node. Semantic shifts are
visualized by arrows between Frames in the same lexical domain (metonymy) and
between Frames in different domains (metaphor). This methodology has been
tested for AQUA MOTION, PAIN, QUALITY, and SOUND in languages from different
families.

In Chapter 5 (“Corpus methods for the investigation of antonyms across
languages”), Caritas Paradis proposes a series of corpus-based techniques to
identify and analyze antonyms cross-linguistically. She reports a set of
experiments and tests for Swedish, Dutch, English, Japanese, and Russian which
can be repeated for other languages. The basic hypothesis is that there are
recurrent antonyms in languages for semantic domains such as SPEED or SIZE
that are central to human experience, and also other, less canonical antonyms,
but which are also essential to understand binary oppositions in language and
cognition. The proposed techniques capture co-occurrence patterns of antonyms
in continuous and discontinuous constructions. For discontinuous
constructions, results show that there are conceptual oppositions between
antonyms, and not only lexical associations. For continuous constructions,
results show that there are various types of antonyms. This diversity serves
as a basis for a cross-linguistic analysis. These techniques provide evidence
that similar patterns exist between languages and that constructions have
different distributions across them.

In Chapter 6 (“Studying colexification through massively parallel corpora”),
Robert Ӧstling uses large annotated and aligned corpora to extract
colexification patterns in languages (distinct meanings for the same lexical
item, cf. François 2008). His work is based on 1142 New Testament translations
in 1001 languages. He tests three colexification patterns, i.e. STONE /
MOUNTAIN, ARM / HAND, and TREE / FIRE. Even after taking the errors of
automatic translations into account, results show that it is possible to
extract colexification patterns from large corpora and to rapidly identify
areal patterns. He illustrates this with the TREE / FIRE colexification, which
is widespread in Australian and Papuan and New-Guinean languages.

In Chapter 7 (“Polysemy in action: The Swedish verb slå ‘hit, strike, beat’ in
a crosslinguistic perspective”) Åke Viberg proposes a cross-linguistic pattern
of semantic shift, based on prototypical meanings of the Swedish verb slå
‘hit, strike, beat’. He uses parallel corpora to (i) provide evidence for
sense extension of the Swedish verb and its parallels in other languages; (ii)
study contextual variations; (iii) take into account the diachronic dimension.
Results are compared to other verbs of contact in a few languages from
different families and areas in a typological perspective. He extracts a
network of sense extensions from a prototypical meaning as an action by manual
contact, which he explicates by a folk model of human biology.

In Chapter 8 (“Making do with minimal lexica. Light verb constructions with
MAKE / DO in pidgin lexica”), Päivi Juvonen examines semantic shifts of MAKE /
DO in thirty pidgins in various areas. These languages have the particularity
of having a highly reduced lexicon (around 150 lexical items), and speakers
recycle available meanings by the massive use of light verb constructions. The
author describes the colexification patterns of these verbs, and then shows
that these patterns can be explicated by grammaticalization or by
conventionalization of usage in idioms.

In Chapter 9 (“Extended uses of body-related temperature expressions”) Susanne
Vejdemo and Sigi Vandewinkel present the results of their cross-linguistic
study of temperature expressions based on body parts in seven languages from
diverse families and areas. They analyze conceptual metaphors from temperature
as source to targets, mostly emotions. It turns out that all the languages
examined have body-temperature expressions and that two conceptual metaphor
pairs determine them, namely CONTROL IS COLD / LACK OF CONTROL IS HOT, and
EMPATHY IS HOT / LACK OF EMPATHY IS COLD. Temperature scales are mapped onto
emotions. The hypothesis that claims that climatic factors determine
body-temperature expressions is not confirmed.

In Chapter 10 (“The semantic domain of emotion in Eskimo and neighbouring
languages”) Michael Fortescue focuses on a characteristic of Eskimo languages
that may be unique. In these languages, some roots referring to emotions
constitute a distinct morphological category. He shows that neighbouring
Chukotian languages but not other neighbouring families also share this
category. He examines this areal pattern and suggests that diachronic and
comparative data tend to acknowledge regular metonymical semantic shifts from
physical / visceral emotions to more abstract emotions, that are culturally
determined.

In Chapter 11 (“Motivational scenarios and semantic frames for social
relations in Slavic, Romance and Germanic languages – friends, enemies, and
others”) Galina Yavorska and Galyna Zymovets combine etymological
reconstructions and synchronic cross-linguistic comparisons to examine
patterns of semantic shifts in the SOCIAL RELATIONS domain in Slavic, Germanic
and Romance languages. Synchronic polysemy is interpreted as a semantic shift
from a source concept to a target concept. It turns out that semantic shift
patterns are variable. Some are widespread such as ENEMY → NOT-FRIEND whereas
some others such as ENEMY → DEVIL are restricted to a small group of
languages.

In Chapter 12 (“Tree, firewood and fire in the languages of Sahul”) Antoinette
Schapper, Lila San Roque and Rachel Hende examine the colexification of TREE,
FIREWOOD and FIRE in 300 Papuan, New-Guinean and Australian languages. They
analyse relations between simple and complex terms that refer to these
concepts, thus helping to elucidate the geographic distribution among families
of this colexification pattern. Results show that (i) the most common
colexification pattern in this area is FIRE-FIREWOOD and that it is present
elsewhere only in South America; (ii) areality is reinforced since this
pattern occurs in Austronesia languages in this area, but not elsewhere, (iii)
this areal pattern has various developments in the different families. It can
be inherited, or be diffused in multiple ways at multiple times.

In Chapter 13 (“Investigating lexical motivation in French and Italian”)
Daniela Maarzo and Birgit Umbreit tackle the question of motivation (polysemy
and word-formation) in French and Italian, from the perspective of
native-speaker judgments. They test four cognitive hypotheses on speaker
preferences. Results show that the recognition of motivated pairs depends on
four interacting factors, namely (1) stimulus frequency, (2) meaning salience,
(3) conceptual relations distribution in the language, and (4) conceptual
relation types. They show that the order of the factors varies. Meaning
salience (2) can overtake stimulus frequency (1) and both can be supplanted by
conceptual relations.

In Chapter 14 (“Types of motivation in folk plant taxonomies”) Wiltrud
Mihatsch analyzes semantic motivation patterns for polysemy and morphological
patterns for word-formation processes in plant taxonomies in Romance
languages. He distinguishes very different motivation patterns either below or
above the basic level, and considers that this fact reveals a folk model of
taxonomy. Relations between the basic level and its subordinate level are
correlated to the degree of prototypicality of the subordinate. And relations
between the basic level and its superordinate level show restrictions
indicating that the basic level is prominent.

In Chapter 15 (“Differences and Interactions between scientific and folk
biological taxonomy”), Maksim Russo deals with semantic shifts of animal and
plant names. Recurrent motivational patterns for these shifts are used to
understand regular cross-linguistic relationships between scientific and folk
taxonomies. The author further examines traces of scientific biology in folk
biology, through examples of scientific terminology in common language and the
associated semantic shifts. Results show that folk classifications tend to use
massively external features and utilitarian properties of entities, whereas
scientific classifications favour the genesis of organisms. He suggests that
scientific biological terms which have become popular in common language
develop semantic features coming from folk biological terms.

In Chapter 16 (“Holistic motivation: systematization and application to the
COOKING domain”), Markus Ising discusses “holistic” motivation, i.e. the
target concept is associated to the source concept and to its expression. He
examines holistic motivation for the COOKING domain in 75 languages from 31
families. It covers contiguity and similarity relations, taxonomy and some
mixed relations between TO COOK / THE COOK and source concepts. There are two
general results. Qualitatively, holistic shifts are not only based on
contiguity and similarity, but also on taxonomy. Quantitatively, taxonomy and
especially the subordination relation are by far the most frequent holistic
motivations.

In Chapter 17 (“Motivation by formally analyzable terms in a typological
perspective: an assessment of the variation and steps towards explanation”),
Matthias Urban inquires into the degree of morphological motivation for
lexical items in languages of the world. Drawing on a sample of 160 prominent
nominal meanings in 78 languages, he shows that there are correlations between
the relative prevalence of analyzability in a language with the size of its
consonant inventory, the complexity of its syllable structure and the length
of its nominal roots. This suggests that languages with a simple phonological
structure have a high lexical analyzability. Recalling the incidence of short
lexical roots on homophony, the author argues that ambiguity avoidance and
communicative efficacy could explain the relative importance of analyzable
items in languages.

EVALUATION

This volume is highly welcome since few reference books on semantic shifts
have been published to date: Traugott and Dasher (2005) was diachronically
oriented, while Vanhove (ed. 2008) connected diachronic semantic change and
synchronic polysemy. This volume is the first one to be clearly typologically
oriented. It covers many languages from various families and areas. However,
Africa, South America and Asia are only dealt with in passing in the chapters,
doubtless due to the sociological / geographical context of the chosen
authors, many of whom are specialists of European and Australian / Papuan New
Guinean languages, but not of other areas.

The volume is remarkably well balanced: each part contains 5 or 6 chapters,
though it would have been helpful if these 3 main parts indicated in the
introduction had been typographically signalled in the table of contents, and
separated in the book.

Some of the chapters resonate with others, even if the theoretical and
methodological choices are not the same.

In the first, theoretically oriented part, Chapters 2, 3, and 5 enrich the
reader's understanding of opposition as a conceptual relation between two
meanings. Chapters 2 and 3 assume that semantic shifts by enantiosemy are
rare, and that the regular cases of opposite meanings in the same linguistic
form have to be  analyzed as the asymmetry of lexical meanings (p. 51-52,
86-87), or as discourse effects and pragmatic conventionalization (p. 69
passim). Chapter 5 extends opposite meanings to encompass lexical antonymy and
distinguishes canonical antonymy reduced to a few basic human domains (SIZE,
SPEED, etc.) from non-canonical antonymy, which is less conventionalized and
more diversified. Enantiosemy is considered here as a particular case of
antonymy.

In the second, descriptively oriented part, the diversity of semantic shifts
in the emotion domain is highlighted by Chapters 9 and 10. Chapter 9 tests
some cognitive hypotheses on conceptual metaphors of temperature expressions
whereas Chapter 10 tests some areal and cultural hypotheses on metonymies of
lexical roots in Eskimo languages. The results of the two chapters, while
approaching the issue on the same level of generalization, are quite
different. Chapter 9 suggests that conceptual metaphors from temperature
expressions to emotions are cross-linguistically well attested, and proposes
two general patterns for languages. Chapter 10 shows that metonymic change
from physical emotions to visceral ones for lexical roots is an areal pattern
for Eskimo languages.

In the third part on motivation, “vertical” conceptual relations of
subordination-superordination in taxonomies are examined firstly from an
internal point of view (Chapter 14), secondly from an external one (Chapter
15), resulting in a rich structural view of biological taxonomies (scientific
and folk).

The results are also significant, whether they be descriptive, theoretical or
methodological.
Among the descriptive results, the most visible ones are areal. Two areal
patterns are highlighted for “Sahul”–a name for a previous continent extending
from Australia to Papua New Guinea- and Eskimo languages. In an
onomasiological perspective (from concept to lexical item, cf. Koch 2001, via
the notion of colexification), Chapters 6 and 12 underline the TREE-FIRE
colexification pattern and even more convincingly the FIRE-FIREWOOD
colexification pattern in Chapter 12. From a semasiological perspective (from
lexical item to concept), the areal pattern of metonymical semantic shifts
from physical / visceral emotions to more abstract and cultural ones from
emotional roots in Eskimo languages (Chapter 10), is striking. Some of the
empirical results are not only areal, however, but also near-universal.
Chapter 7 proposes a cognitive model to understand the prototypical meaning of
verbs of hitting, and Chapter 17 shows the correlation between lexicon
analyzability in a language and its phonological inventory.

As for the methodological results, the most concrete ones show that semantic
shifts have to be analyzed from various perspectives to produce innovative
results. At this stage, the widely used notion of colexification (Chapters 5,
6, 8, 12) seems adequate to identify recurrent cross-linguistic patterns of
semantic shifts. It remains insufficient, however, to analyze these patterns.
In Chapter 5, constructions are taken into account to analyze recurrent
cross-linguistic patterns of binary oppositions. In Chapter 8, diachrony is
also involved to analyze the development of colexification patterns through
grammaticalization. And in Chapter 12, it is the morphological analyzability
of lexical items that is required to understand the distribution of
colexification among language families and their spoken areas.

Furthermore, the notion of construction (Goldberg 1995) is
quasi-systematically called upon to analyze the different types of semantic
shifts (Chapters 2, 3, 4, 7, 70, 16, 17). Chapter 2 theorizes this question by
proposing a construction-based approach to model its multidimensional
diachronic analysis of semantic change, word-formation and borrowing. Chapter
3 distinguishes different cases of enantiosemy by the different constructions
that they display. Analyzing different constructions, Chapter 4 argues for a
better generalization of recurrent cross-linguistic semantic shifts. Taking
roots as the basis of morphological constructions, Chapters 10 and 17 assume
the central role of constructions in the analysis of semantic shifts.

This volume, which considers semantic shifts from various perspectives
(semasiological as well as onomasiological, synchronic as well as diachronic)
and aspects (universal and areal, cognition- and culture-based), provides an
in-depth, multi-faceted view of semantic shifts. This is undoubtedly the most
important theoretical result. Chapter 2 is emblematic in this respect. It
theorizes a multidimensional approach to semantic shifts (p. 59). It combines
both onomasiology and semasiology, examining semantic change at different
historical periods, taking into account the speaker-induced vs hearer-induced
meaning change distinction, with fine-grained distinctions between different
types of semantic change (generalization vs specialization of meaning,
co-hyponymous transfer, metonymic and metaphoric change, contrast-based
change, pejorization vs meliorization of meaning, intensification vs weakening
of meaning) in order to understand the interactions between semantic change
and other diachronic lexical processes (word-formation, borrowing). This
results in multi-faceted semantic shifts, which are considered as the sums of
meaning-form correlations, with conceptual relationships between two concepts,
and motivated dynamic processes. While Peter Koch is the only one to theorize
such a multi-faceted view of semantic shifts, most of the other authors
combine different facets in their analyses.

Many further avenues for research are proposed in the book. Several papers
suggest that more advances in recurrent cross-linguistic semantic shifts have
to be made, especially in areal and genetic diversity. Some of them hope to
give more comprehensive explanations of the principles that motivate these
recurrent cross-linguistic semantic shifts.

Obviously, this volume cannot cover all the approaches available which deal
with semantic shifts (see e.g. lexical network techniques in Gaume, Duvignaud
and Vanhove 2008). Nonetheless, it covers many aspects and perspectives on
semantic shifts. Its lexico-typological scope provides deep insight into
various facts about semantic shifts. This volume should become a reference
book on this topic in the future. Since each chapter is carefully argued, this
volume will interest researchers in lexicology, typology, as well as in
cognitive and cultural linguistics.

REFERENCES CITED

The volume is full of important references. Here are just the ones I have
cited.

Apresjan, Juri D. 2000. Systematic lexicography. (transl. Kevin Kindle),
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

François, Alexandre. 2008 “Semantic maps and the typology of colexification:
Intertwining polysemous networks across languages”. In Martine Vanhove (ed.),
>From polysemy to semantic change. Towards a typology of lexical semantic
associations, 163-216. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Gaume Bruno, Karine Duvignaud and Martine Vanhove. 2008. “Semantic
associations and confluences in paradigmatic networks”. In Martine Vanhove
(ed.), From polysemy to semantic change. Towards a typology of lexical
semantic associations, 233-264.

Goldberg Adele A. 1995. Constructions: a construction grammar approach to
argument structure. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Koch Peter. 2001. “Lexical typology from a cognitive and linguistic point of
view”. In Martin Haspelmath, Eckehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, and Wolfgang
Raible (eds.), Language typology and language universals. An international
handbook, vol.2, 1142-1178. Berlin / New York: De Gruyter.

Traugott, Elizabeth C. and Richard B. Dasher. 2005. Regularity in Semantic
Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vanhove, Martine (ed.). 2008. From polysemy to semantic change. Towards a
typology of lexical semantic associations. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

In his first published book (his PhD dissertation), Olivier Bondeelle
(Associate Member of MoDyCo - CNRS France) proposed a unified analysis and
treatment on various meaning relationships, produced by lexical as well as
grammatical phenomena (polysemy, conversion, derivation, alternation,
phraseology). It offers a better comprehensive view of the structure of the
lexicon. The studied language was Wolof, an important lingua franca in
Senegal, West Africa. He is currently working on others languages from the
same geographical region (Atlantic, Mande, Creoles), with an areal and lexical
typological perspective.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4144	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/