[Lingtyp] Universal constraints on lexicalisation

[Östen Dahl]

Dear all,

With regard to the claim that 'father' and 'mother's brother' cannot be colexified, consider the following quotation from the Wikipedia article on "Matrilineality":

"While a mother normally takes care of her own children in all cultures, in some matrilineal cultures an "uncle-father" will take care of his nieces and nephews instead: in other words *social fathers* here are uncles."

That is, fathers and maternal uncles are similar in that they can both play the role of "social fathers"; it is not unthinkable that a language spoken in a society on the borderline between patrilineality and matrilineality will lexify the concept "social father". What this shows is that the criterion of cognitive complexity can lead you in the wrong direction. In fact, kinship terms sometimes unite relationships which are tricky to give a common definition, such as "brother-in-law" in English.


  *   Östen


Från: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> För Martin Haspelmath via Lingtyp
Skickat: den 1 februari 2025 16:40
Till: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] Universal constraints on lexicalisation


Dear Masha and others,

In addition to "cognitive complexity", one may also consider frequency of use as constraining lexification.

For example, 'female wolf' is not more cognitively complex than 'female horse' (English mare, contrasting with stallion), but gender/sex is less commonly mentioned in connection with wild animals than with domestic animals, so English does not dislexify 'male wolf' and 'female wolf'.

In my 2023 Frontiers paper, I suggested that some important lexification tendencies can be explained with reference to root length possibilities: Roots are typically 1-2 syllables long, so when a meaning is not frequent enough, it needs more syllables and hence multiple morphs:
Haspelmath, Martin. 2023. Coexpression and synexpression patterns across languages: Comparative concepts and possible explanations. Frontiers in Psychology 14. (doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1236853)

(The paper also cites David Gil's 1992 paper.)

Incidentally, it seems that "lexification" is clearer than "lexicalization", because the latter is used in multiple meanings (see my 2024 paper, §7: https://www.peren-revues.fr/lexique/1737).

Best,

Martin


On 01.02.25 12:40, David Gil via Lingtyp wrote:
Hi Masha,

Some examples from the semantic domain of quantification can be found here:


Gil, David (1992) "Scopal Quantifiers: Some Universals of Lexical Effability", in M. Kefer and J. van der Auwera eds., Meaning and Grammar, Cross-Linguistic Perspectives, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 303-345.

Best wishes,

David



On Sat, Feb 1, 2025 at 5:29 PM Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>> wrote:
Dear all,

I am involved in a handbook chapter in which I would like to give a few examples of suggested universal constraints on lexicalisation, e.g., those primarily concerning meanings that should not be expressible in a word (a stem, root or whatever), preferably not from the domain of colour terms. To give an example, Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2010) argue that no verb encodes both manner and result simultaneously, which has been contested by Beavers and Koontz-Garbodens.

Or,  a definition of a term covering both ‘father’ and ‘mother’s brother’ would be cognitively very complex since it will require disjunction (‘father’ or ‘mother’s brother’, cf. ‘male relative of one’s patriline’ for ‘father’ and ‘father’s brother’) (Evans 2001) – I don’t know if this constraint still holds.

Many thanks and all the best,
Masha

Prof. Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm
Dept. of linguistics, Stockholm university, 106 91, Stockholm, Sweden
Editor-in-chief of “Linguistic Typology”
President-Elect of Societas Linguistic Europaea
www.ling.su.se/tamm<http://www.ling.su.se/tamm>
tamm at ling.su.se<mailto:tamm at ling.su.se>

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David Gil



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