Coexpression and synexpression patterns across languages: comparative concepts and possible explanations

Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

Martin Haspelmath¹ 

[1] null;

关键词: lexical typology;    colexification;    syncretism;    cumulative exponence;    polysemy;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1236853

 received in 2023-06-08, accepted in 2023-08-21,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Meanings and linguistic shapes (or forms) do not always map onto each other in a unique way, and linguists have used all kinds of different terms for such situations: Ambiguity, polysemy, syncretism, lexicalization, semantic maps; portmanteau, cumulative exponence, feature bundling, underspecification, and so on. In the domain of lexical comparison, the term colexification has become generally established in recent years, and in the present paper, I extend this word-formation pattern in a regular way (cogrammification, coexpression; syllexification, syngrammification, synexpression). These novel terms allow us to chart the range of relevant phenomena in a systematic way across the grammar-lexicon continuum, and to ask whether highly general explanations of coexpression and synexpression patterns are possible. While there is no new proposal for explaining coexpression here, I will suggest that frequency of occurrence plays a crucial role in explaining synexpression patterns.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
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