Abstract
AbstractIn this article I demonstrate that there is a pervasive lexico-semantic associationbones are strengthin the languages of Melanesia, but that its linguistic expression is highly varied; languages are scattered along a lexical-to-clausal cline in their expression of the association between bone and strength, with a large number of language-specific idioms based on the association to be observed in Melanesia. I argue that the striking areality of this lexico-semantic association is readily missed in top-down approaches to lexical semantic typology that rely, for instance, on databases of word lists, or on narrow search domains limited to the meanings of simplex lexemes.
Highlights
Over the last 60 years or more, typologists have made great strides in understanding the diversity and uniformity of the world’s languages
I argue that the striking areality of this lexico-semantic association is readily missed in top-down approaches to lexical semantic typology that rely, for instance, on databases of word lists, or on narrow search domains limited to the meanings of simplex lexemes
In this paper I have argued that there is a widespread association between bone and strength in the Melanesian Linguistic Area
Summary
Over the last 60 years or more, typologists have made great strides in understanding the diversity and uniformity of the world’s languages. The emergence of colexification as a new tool for lexical typological research has been concomitant with the growth of digital databases of lexical material from across the languages of the world, for the purposes of historical-comparative linguistic research (e.g., WOLD, Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009; IDS, Key and Comrie 2015; ASJP, Wichmann et al 2018) These databases have been co-opted for use in colexification studies concerned with identifying patterns or skewings of patterns on a global-scale (e.g., Gast and Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2018; Jackson et al 2019; Östling 2016; Pericliev 2015) and given rise to collated databases for automized detection of colexifications, most notably the various incarnations of CLICS (Version 1: List et al 2014, Version 2: List et al 2018, Version 3: Rzymski and Tresoldi 2020).
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