[Lingtyp] Colexificiation of 'hot' and 'cold'

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear Ian – Your question is a special case of the broader question to what extent languages colexify antonymous senses. This is a question I happen to have recently become interested in, so thanks for bringing it up here!

Obviously, if there is nothing in the form of the expression that distinguishes the putative senses, how could the linguist tell that this is really a case of polysemy, rather than one of vagueness? (Cf. below re. Françoise’ (2008) advocacy for polysemism.) And how would speakers know which sense is intended in any given utterance? Context will in many cases render one sense more likely than the other, but what if the speaker intends the less probable sense? How would she differentiate? (This is not a rhetorical question. Disambiguating paraphrases should always be possible. The question is instead how communicatively useful an undifferentiated expression that frequently requires paraphrase or leads to misunderstandings would be, and where the limits of languages tolerating expressions of low communicative usefulness lie.)

In the case that you describe, if the expression is truly undifferentiated for ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, have you tested whether it really means something like ‘causing the (mildly or intensely painful) sensation that is associated with hot and cold objects’? Or, in other words, ‘being of a temperature that is noticeably distinct from the human body temperature’?

Obviously, this hypothetical meaning would not apply to objects whose temperature is in the vicinity of the human body temperature. So the simple test would be whether the expression still applies to such objects. If it does, the question for me would be how such an expression could ever be informative, since there is apparently no physical object that it could ever not apply to? Extensionally, the expression would then simply be synonymous with ‘physical object’.

OTOH if the expression does not apply to objects of body temperature, then should we say that it is polysemous between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, or should we say that it has the monosemous meaning ‘being of a temperature that is noticeable to touch (because it is noticeably different from body temperature)’?

François (2008) advocates for what one might call a “pragmatically polysemist” approach to colexification, which I can understand. However, I think the problem raised by colexification of antonymous senses illustrates the limitations of this view.

The problem I see is this: It is an important empirical difference whether the expression you describe means ‘being of a temperature that is noticeable to touch’ or whether it applies to objects of any temperature. Furthermore, it is an important empirical question whether languages actually have expressions of the first kind, and (particularly) whether languages actually have expressions of the latter kind.

For researchers who happen to not be interested in these questions, it’s perfectly legitimate to simply treat the expression in question as conflating ‘hot’ and ‘cold’.

But, I would think that the question to what extent languages evolve expressions that conflate antonymous senses is precisely the kind of question that makes colexification typology interesting. And I suspect that if we want to discover and theorize the limits of colexification of antonymous senses, we’ll have to occasionally pierce the self-imposed veil of “pragmatic polysemism”.

Best – Juergen

François, A. (2008). Semantic maps and the typology of colexification: Intertwining polysemous networks across languages. In M. Vanhove (ed.), From polysemy to semantic change: Towards a typology of lexical semantic associations. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 163–215.



Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of JOO Ian via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 05:00
To: <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Colexificiation of 'hot' and 'cold'
Dear typologists,

Today I have learned that, in the Hokkaido dialect of Japanese Sign Language, ‘hot (object)’ and ‘cold (object)’ are colexified. The consultant told me that there could be a difference in the non-manual expression, but it didn’t seem distinctive to me. ‘Hot (weather)’ and ‘cold (weather)’ are not colexified, however.
Are there other lects (sign or spoken) where ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ are colexified? Or is this a rather unusual case?

From Otaru, Japan,
Ian

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