[Lingtyp] tendencies of lexification

[Martin Haspelmath]

Many thanks to Temuulen Khishigsuren for pointing to this important line 
of work!

There is actually earlier work by Witold Mańczak (1966; 1970), who 
proposed a general law which I called "Mańczak's Law of Differentiation":

*Frequently used linguistic elements are generally more differentiated.*

I first became aware of this as a possible highly general law after 
reading Regier et al.'s 2016 paper about snow/ice differentiation 
(https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0151138): 
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.)

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 (https://zenodo.org/records/10958622), 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.

It might be that this also partially explains the lexification patterns 
observed with antonymy by Koptjevskaja-Tamm et al. (2024) 
(https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2023-0140/html). 
The authors say (in §5):

"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"

Best,

Martin

On 05.02.25 23:45, Temuulen Khishigsuren via Lingtyp wrote:
> Dear Masha and all,
>
> 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.
>
> An initial write up is here:
>
> Khishigsuren et al. 2025. Usage frequency predicts lexicalization 
> across languages (preprint:https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fqdjv_v1)
>
> 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.
>
> Best,
> Temuulen
>
> PhD candidate
> Complex Human Data Hub
> University of Melbourne

-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
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