[Lingtyp] FINAL CALL: Contact and inheritance in semantics, SLE 2025

Thu Nov 14 12:15:51 UTC 2024

We are issuing a final call for abstracts for our proposed SLE 2025
workshop:
(note we need abstracts by next week)

*Disentangling contact and inheritance in lexical semantics*

We invite scholars working on areal or phylogenetic dimensions of lexical
semantics to submit abstracts of up to 300 words for a proposed workshop at
SLE 2025. Please send abstracts to John Mansfield john.mansfield at uzh.ch and
Paul Widmer paul.widmer at uzh.ch, by *Tuesday 19 November*. We will include
selected abstracts in our workshop proposal, which will be evaluated by the
SLE committee. If successful, final abstracts will be due in January.

SLE 2025 will be held in Bordeaux, France, from 26-29 August.

https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/first-call-for-papers/

Recent years have seen growth in the study of comparative lexical
semantics, especially but not limited to the “colexification” paradigm
(François
2008). Colexification research investigates, for example, the distribution
of languages that either distinguish HAND from ARM, or “colexify” HAND/ARM.
Much more research is still required to understand how such distributions
are shaped by phylogenetic inheritance and areal contact.

A special issue of *Linguistic Typology* on Areal Semantics (Schapper &
Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2022) has highlighted the need for more systematic
research on areal clustering of lexical meanings. For example languages of
the Hindu Kush area use kinship terms that group into geographic clusters,
while cross-cutting phylogenetic clades (Liljegren 2022). Similarly, a
region of western Africa exhibits particular colexifications of colour
terms with natural colour sources (e.g. YELLOW = LOCUST BEAN), though the
presence of many unrelated lexemes indicates conceptual patterns that have
spread through multilingual interaction, as opposed to purely lexical
inheritance (Segerer & Vanhove 2022). These studies highlight that
inheritance in lexical semantics can be considered either in terms of
phylogenetic clades, specific etymologies, or cognate sets.

Other studies have focused more on the diachronic dimension. Various
studies have investigated common semantic changes in etymological chains (e.g.
Wilkins 1996; Traugott & Dasher 2001), and several projects are now
underway to investigate these effects more systematically, including
EvoSem (François
& Kalyan 2023) and DiACL (Carling et al. 2023).

Both areal and phylogenetic dimensions can also be studied against the
background of universal patterns in lexical semantics. Semantic research
here intersects with cognitive science and theories of communicative
efficiency, with key findings on kinship (Kemp & Regier 2012), colour
(Zaslavsky
et al. 2020), numbers (Calude & Verkerk 2016), and the natural
environment (Regier
et al. 2016). This intersection has led to a burst of research on global
colexification patterns, focusing especially on general cognitive biases
relating to efficiency, similarity and association. These biases drive
similar colexification patterns among languages of the world (Srinivasan &
Rabagliati 2015; Youn et al. 2016; Xu et al. 2020; Brochhagen & Boleda
2022; Tjuka et al. 2024), as well as child language (Brochhagen et al.
2023) and
artificial language learning (Karjus et al. 2021).

While systematic global studies have tended to focus on lexical semantic
universals, in this workshop we are seeking submissions that pay particular
attention to how universals are modulated by areal and phylogenetic
effects, and especially studies that aim to disentangle the two. In
typological research more generally, there have been significant recent
advances in distinguishing contact vs inheritance (e.g. Ranacher et al.
2021; Allassonnière-Tang et al. 2021; Neureiter et al. 2022; Guzmán Naranjo
& Mertner 2023). An obvious next step is to apply such methods to lexical
semantics, which will provide a more robust test for claims of universals,
while also investigating claims of areality in a more rigorous way.

We particularly seek submissions characterised by:

   1. Methodological innovation and statistical techniques;
   2. Investigation of large datasets such as Lexibank;
   3. Use of corpora or large language models for comparative lexical
   semantics;
   4. Regional case studies compared against global baselines;
   5. Phylogenetic modelling;
   6. Cluster detection based on geographic or genetic proximity.

*References*

Allassonnière-Tang, Marc & Lundgren, Olof & Robbers, Maja & Cronhamn,
Sandra & Larsson, Filip & Her, One-Soon & Hammarström, Harald & Carling,
Gerd. 2021. Expansion by migration and diffusion by contact is a source to
the global diversity of linguistic nominal categorization systems. *Humanities
and Social Sciences Communications*. Palgrave 8(1). 1–6.
(doi:10.1057/s41599-021-01003-5)

Brochhagen, Thomas & Boleda, Gemma. 2022. When do languages use the same
word for different meanings? The Goldilocks principle in colexification.
*Cognition* 226. 105179. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105179)

Brochhagen, Thomas & Boleda, Gemma & Gualdoni, Eleonora & Xu, Yang. 2023.
>From language development to language evolution: A unified view of human
lexical creativity. *Science*. American Association for the Advancement of
Science 381(6656). 431–436. (doi:10.1126/science.ade7981)

Calude, Andreea S. & Verkerk, Annemarie. 2016. The typology and diachrony
of higher numerals in Indo-European: a phylogenetic comparative study. *Journal
of Language Evolution* 1(2). 91–108. (doi:10.1093/jole/lzw003)

Carling, Gerd & Cronhamn, Sandra & Lundgren, Olof & Bogren Svensson, Victor
& Frid, Johan. 2023. The evolution of lexical semantics dynamics,
directionality, and drift. *Frontiers in Communication* 8.

François, Alexandre. 2008. Semantic maps and the typology of
colexification: Intertwining polysemous networks across languages. In
Vanhove, Martine (ed.), *From Polysemy to Semantic Change: Towards a
typology of lexical semantic associations* (Studies in Language Companion
Series), 163–215. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
(doi:10.1075/slcs.106.09fra)

François, Alexandre & Kalyan, Siva. 2023. Dialexification: A tool for
studying cross-linguistic patterns of semantic change. *International
Cognitive Linguistics Conference*, 46–47. Dusseldorf.

Guzmán Naranjo, Matías & Mertner, Miri. 2023. Estimating areal effects in
typology: a case study of African phoneme inventories. *Linguistic Typology*.
De Gruyter Mouton 27(2). 455–480. (doi:10.1515/lingty-2022-0037)

Karjus, Andres & Blythe, Richard A. & Kirby, Simon & Wang, Tianyu & Smith,
Kenny. 2021. Conceptual similarity and communicative need shape
colexification: An experimental study. *Cognitive Science* 45(9). e13035.
(doi:10.1111/cogs.13035)

Kemp, Charles & Regier, Terry. 2012. Kinship categories across languages
reflect general communicative principles. *Science*. American Association
for the Advancement of Science 336(6084). 1049–1054.
(doi:10.1126/science.1218811)

Liljegren, Henrik. 2022. Kinship terminologies reveal ancient contact zone
in the Hindu Kush. *Linguistic Typology*. De Gruyter Mouton 26(2). 211–245.
(doi:10.1515/lingty-2021-2080)

Neureiter, Nico & Ranacher, Peter & Efrat-Kowalsky, Nour & Kaiping, Gereon
A. & Weibel, Robert & Widmer, Paul & Bouckaert, Remco R. 2022. Detecting
contact in language trees: a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal
transfer. *Humanities and Social Sciences Communications*. Palgrave 9(1).
1–14. (doi:10.1057/s41599-022-01211-7)

Ranacher, Peter & Neureiter, Nico & van Gijn, Rik & Sonnenhauser, Barbara &
Escher, Anastasia & Weibel, Robert & Muysken, Pieter & Bickel, Balthasar.
2021. Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to
detect geographic areas of language contact. *Journal of The Royal Society
Interface*. Royal Society 18(181). 20201031. (doi:10.1098/rsif.2020.1031)

Regier, Terry & Carstensen, Alexandra & Kemp, Charles. 2016. Languages
support efficient communication about the environment: Words for snow
revisited. *PLOS ONE*. Public Library of Science 11(4). e0151138.
(doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0151138)

Schapper, Antoinette & Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 2022. Introduction to
special issue on areal typology of lexico-semantics. *Linguistic Typology*.
De Gruyter Mouton 26(2). 199–209. (doi:10.1515/lingty-2021-2087)

Segerer, Guillaume & Vanhove, Martine. 2022. Areal patterns and
colexifications of colour terms in the languages of Africa. *Linguistic
Typology*. De Gruyter Mouton 26(2). 247–281. (doi:10.1515/lingty-2021-2085)

Srinivasan, Mahesh & Rabagliati, Hugh. 2015. How concepts and conventions
structure the lexicon: Cross-linguistic evidence from polysemy.
*Lingua* (Polysemy:
Current Perspectives and Approaches) 157. 124–152.
(doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2014.12.004)

Tjuka, Annika & Forkel, Robert & List, Johann-Mattis. 2024. Universal and
cultural factors shape body part vocabularies. *Scientific Reports*. Nature
Publishing Group 14(1). 10486. (doi:10.1038/s41598-024-61140-0)

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Dasher, Richard B. 2001. *Regularity in
semantic change*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(doi:10.1017/CBO9780511486500)
(/core/books/regularity-in-semantic-change/F07CBB401A177975904C1E37BE0D9E07)
(Accessed July 15, 2019.)

Wilkins, David P. 1996. Natural tendencies of semantic change and the
search for cognates. In Durie, Mark & Ross, Malcolm (eds.), *The
Comparative Method reviewed: Regularity and irregularity in language change*,
264–304. New York: Oxford University Press.

Xu, Yang & Duong, Khang & Malt, Barbara C. & Jiang, Serena & Srinivasan,
Mahesh. 2020. Conceptual relations predict colexification across languages.
*Cognition* 201. 104280. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104280)

Youn, Hyejin & Sutton, Logan & Smith, Eric & Moore, Cristopher & Wilkins,
Jon F. & Maddieson, Ian & Croft, William & Bhattacharya, Tanmoy. 2016. On
the universal structure of human lexical semantics. *Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences*. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 113(7). 1766–1771. (doi:10.1073/pnas.1520752113)

Zaslavsky, Noga & Kemp, Charles & Tishby, Naftali & Regier, Terry. 2020.
Communicative need in colour naming. *Cognitive Neuropsychology* 37(5–6).
312–324. (doi:10.1080/02643294.2019.1604502)
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