colexification

Colexification describes the case of different meanings being expressed by the same word (i.e., “co-lexified”) in a language. For example, the two senses which are distinguished in English as people and village are colexified in Spanish, which uses pueblo in both cases.

Colexification is meant as a neutral descriptive term that avoids distinguishing between vagueness, polysemy, and homonymy. Some cases of colexification are common across the world (e.g. ‘blue’ = ‘green’); others are typical of certain linguistic and cultural areas (e.g. ‘tree’ = ‘fire’ among Papuan and Australian languages;See Schapper et al. (2016). or ‘thunder’ = ‘dragon’ in the Sino-Tibetan languagesSee Ding & Dong (2024).).

The opposite of “co-lexify” is “dis-lexify”, i.e. 'express two meanings using different lexical forms'.François (2022:95). Thus, Russian colexifies 'arm' and 'hand' using the single word рука, but Spanish dislexifies these two meanings using two distinct words, respectively brazo v. mano.

{{rquote|right|text=“A given language is said to colexify two functionally distinct senses if, and only if, it can associate them with the same lexical form.”|author=François (2008: 170)See also François (2022):95): “A language colexifies two distinct senses if it can express them using the same lexical form.”.}} The term was coined by the linguist Alexandre François in his 2008 article “Semantic maps and the typology of colexification”. This article illustrated the notion with various examples, including the semantic domains of { {{sc|straight}} }, { {{sc|call}} }, { {{sc|breathe}} }. The latter notion is at the source of a colexification network that is attested in several languages, linking together such senses as ‘breath’, ‘life’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘ghost’...: Skr. आत्मन् ātmán; Anc. Gk ψυχή, πνεῦμα; Lat. animus, spīritus; Arab. روح rūḥ, etc. François built on that example to propose a method for constructing lexical semantic maps.

Several studies have taken up the concept of colexification and applied it to different semantic domains and various language families.See the bibliography.

Colexification is also the object of a dedicated database, known as [https://clics.clld.org/ CLiCS] “Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications”.See List et al. (2018) and Rzymski et al. (2020). Based on data from more than 2400 language varieties of the world, the database makes it possible to check the typological frequency of individual instances of colexification,For example, the [https://clics.clld.org/edges/1079-1408 colexification pair ‘hear’–‘feel’]. and to visualize semantic networksFor example, the [https://clics.clld.org/graphs/subgraph_3 subgraph around the notion { {{sc|brave}} }] based on empirical data from the world's languages.

• Onomasiology
• Ontology
• Polysemy
• Synonymy
• Semantic change
• Semantic maps

{{Reflist}}

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Category:Lexical semantics

Category:Polysemy

Category:Homonymy