1 research outputs found
An Exercise in Visualizing Colexification on a Semantic Map
This paper aims at investigating the polysemic patterns associated with the
notion ‘soil/earth’ by using the semantic map model as a methodological tool.
We focus on the applicability of the model to the lexicon, since most of past
research has been devoted to the analysis of grammatical morphemes. The most
concise result of our research is a diagrammatic visualization of the semantic
spaces of twenty lexemes in nine different languages, mainly ancient languages
belonging to the Indo-European and the Afro-Asiatic language families. The
common semantic map for the various languages reveals that the semantic spaces
covered by the investigated lexemes are often quite different from one
another, although common patterns can also be detected. Our study highlights
some shortcomings and methodological problems of previous analyses suggesting
that a possible solution to these problems is the control of the data in the
existing sources of the object languages. Finally, drawing upon the cognitive
linguistics literature on the various types of semantic change, we show that
some of the senses of the individual lexemes are the result of the function of
such mechanisms as metaphor, metonymy, and generalization