Areal typology of lexico-semantics

Course author

Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm

Professor, Stockholm University

 

 

Course materials

Areal semantics.pdf

Course description

Morpho-syntactic and phonological features are regularly used by linguists to establish the existence of linguistic areas and construct areally based typologies. By contrast, lexico-semantic phenomena   have, with a few exceptions (e.g. Matisoff 2004, Enfield 2003, Smith-Stark 1994), received remarkably little attention from areal linguistics and areal typology, and little is known about the geographical variation they display. This course will advance the discussion on lexico-semantic phenomena showing parallels across languages and how these similarities may be described and accounted for – by universal tendencies, genetic relations among the languages, their contacts and/or their common extra-linguistic surrounding.

The study of lexical phenomena is of course well-established in research on language contact – cf. Grossman’s course on the typology of lexical borrowings. Areal lexico-semantics (Ameka & Wilkins 1996, Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Liljegren 2017), by contrast, is concerned not with the way words move from language to language, but with the diffusion of semantic features across language boundaries in a geographical area. In the course we will primarily focus on polysemy (colexification) patterns and lexical motivation, collocational patterns, the general organization of a lexical field, polysemy (colexification) patterns and lexical motivation, collocational patterns etc., keeping in mind that areal lexico-semantics is a potentially vast field, spanning the convergence of individual lexemes, through the structuring of entire semantic domains to the organization of complete lexicons.