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- Agbetsoamedo, Yvonne, et al.
(author)
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Temperature terms in the Ghanaian languages in a typological perspective
- 2015
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This talk deals with the conceptualisation of temperature in some of the Ghanaian languages as reflected in their systems of central temperature terms, such as hot, cold, to freeze, etc. We will discuss these systems in the light of a large-scale cross-linguistic collaborative project, involving 35 researchers (including the present authors) and covering more than 50 genetically, areally and typologically diverse languages (Koptjevskaja-Tamm ed. 2015). The key questions addressed here are how the different languages carve up the temperature domain by means of their linguistic expressions, and how the temperature expressions are used outside of the temperature domain. Languages cut up the temperature domain among their expressions according to three main dimensions: TEMPERATURE VALUES (e.g., warming vs. cooling temperatures, or excessive heat vs. pleasant warmth), FRAMES OF TEMPERATURE EVALUATION (TACTILE, The stones are cold; AMBIENT, It is cold here; and PERSONAL-FEELING, I am cold), and ENTITIES whose “temperature” is evaluated. Although the temperature systems are often internally heterogeneous, we may still talk about the main temperature value distinctions for the whole system. The Ghanaian languages favour the cross-linguistically preferred two-value systems, with water often described by a more elaborated system. An interesting issue concerns conventionalisation and frequency of expressions with a primary meaning outside of the temperature domain, for temperature uses. For instance, the conventionalised expressions for talking about ‘warm/hot’ in Ewe involve sources of heat (‘fire’) and bodily exuviae (‘sweat’). The Ghanaian languages often manifest numerous extended uses of their temperature terms. However, strikingly, none of them conforms to one of the most widely quoted conceptual metaphors, “affection is warmth” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999:50), which is also true for many other languages in (West) Africa and otherwise.
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| 2. |
- Buchanan, E. M., et al.
(author)
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The Psychological Science Accelerator's COVID-19 rapid-response dataset
- 2023
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In: Scientific Data. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2052-4463. ; 10:1
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures for each experimental study, a general questionnaire examining health prevention behaviors and COVID-19 experience, geographical and cultural context characterization, and demographic information for each participant. Each participant started the study with the same general questions and then was randomized to complete either one longer experiment or two shorter experiments. Data were provided by 73,223 participants with varying completion rates. Participants completed the survey from 111 geopolitical regions in 44 unique languages/dialects. The anonymized dataset described here is provided in both raw and processed formats to facilitate re-use and further analyses. The dataset offers secondary analytic opportunities to explore coping, framing, and self-determination across a diverse, global sample obtained at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be merged with other time-sampled or geographic data.
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| 4. |
- Gast, Volker, et al.
(author)
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Patterns of persistence and diffusibility in the European lexicon
- 2022
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In: Linguistic typology. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 1430-0532 .- 1613-415X. ; 26:2, s. 403-438
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article investigates to what extent the semantics and the phonological forms of lexical items are genealogically inherited or acquired through language contact. We focus on patterns of colexification (the encoding of two concepts with the same word) as an aspect of lexical-semantic organization. We test two pairs of hypotheses. The first pair concerns the genealogical stability (persistence) and susceptibility to contact-induced change (diffusibility) of colexification patterns and phonological matter in the 40 most genealogically stable elements of the 100-items Swadesh list, which we call “nuclear vocabulary”. We hypothesize that colexification patterns are (a) less persistent, and (b) more diffusible, than the phonological form of nuclear vocabulary. The second pair of hypotheses concerns degrees of diffusibility in two different sections of the lexicon – “core vocabulary” (all 100 elements of the Swadesh list) and its complement (“non-core/peripheral vocabulary”). We hypothesize that the colexification patterns associated with core vocabulary are (a) more persistent, and (b) less diffusible, than colexification patterns associated with peripheral vocabulary. The four hypotheses are tested using the lexical-semantic data from the CLICS database and independently determined phonological dissimilarity measures. The hypothesis that colexification patterns are less persistent than the phonological matter of nuclear vocabulary receives clear support. The hypothesis that colexification patterns are more diffusible than phonological matter receives some support, but a significant difference can only be observed for unrelated languages. The hypothesis that colexification patterns involving core vocabulary are more genealogically stable than colexification patterns at the periphery of the lexicon cannot be confirmed, but the data seem to indicate a higher degree of diffusibility for colexification patterns at the periphery of the lexicon. While we regard the results of our study as valid, we emphasize the tentativeness of our conclusions and point out some limitations as well as desiderata for future research to enable a better understanding of the genealogical versus areal distribution of linguistic features.
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| 5. |
- Gast, Volker, et al.
(author)
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The areal factor in lexical typology : Some evidence from lexical databases
- 2018
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In: Aspects of linguistic variation. - : Walter de Gruyter. - 9783110607956 - 9783110607963 ; , s. 43-82
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Our study aims to explore how much information about areal patterns of colexification we can gain from lexical databases, such as CLICS and ASJP. We adopt a bottom-up (rather than hypothesis-driven) approach, identifying areal patterns in three steps: (i) determine spatial autocorrelations in the data, (ii) identify clusters as candidates for convergence areas and (iii) test the clusters resulting from the second step controlling for genealogical relatedness. Moreover, we identify a (genealogical) diversity index for each cluster. This approach yields promising results, which we regard as a proof of concept, but we also point out some drawbacks of the use of major lexical databases.
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| 8. |
- Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria, 1957-, et al.
(author)
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A cross-linguistic study of lexical and derived antonymy
- 2024
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In: Linguistics. - 0024-3949 .- 1613-396X.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Antonymy is the lexical relation of opposition. The nature of the oppositeness may differ - e.g., contradictory ('true'-'false') or gradable ('tall'-'short') - and there may be variation as to the relationship in their formal encoding, whether the antonyms are expressed as distinct lexical forms (e.g., true vs. false) or if one form is derived from the other (e.g., true vs. untrue). We investigate the relationship between the two members of 37 antonym pairs across 55 spoken languages in order to see whether there are patterns in how antonymy is expressed and which of the two antonym members is more likely to be derived from the other. We find great variation in the extent to which languages use derivation (labeled neg-constructed forms) as an antonym-formation strategy. However, when we do find a derived form, this tends to target the member of the pair that is either lower in valence (positive vs. negative) or magnitude (more vs. less), in line with our hypotheses. We also find that antonyms that belong to a core set of property concepts are more likely to encode antonyms as distinct lexical forms, whereas peripheral property concepts are relatively more likely to encode the antonyms with derived forms.
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| 10. |
- Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria, 1957-
(author)
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A Mozart sonata and the Palme funeral : The structure and uses of proper-name compounds in Swedish
- 2013
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In: Morphosyntactic Categories and the Expression of Possession. - Amsterdam/Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing Company. - 9789027255822 - 9789027273000 ; , s. 253-290
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper focuses on Swedish nominal compounds with a personal proper name as their first component (PropN-compounds), e.g. en Mozart+sonat ‘a Mozart sonata’ or Palme+mord-et ‘the Palme murder’ (‘Palme+murder-the’). Although these expressions have so far hardly appeared in the scientific discourse on possession, they do in fact constitute an important resource for expressing possession in the broadest sense in Swedish and, further, in Germanic. For instance, many PropN-compounds are more or less synonymous with nominals modified by preposed s-genitives and/or by postposed prepositional phrases, i.e. by the two constructions that make up the core of adnominal possession in Swedish. In the present paper I will be mostly interested in the structure and meanings/uses of PropN-compounds, in particular, as compared to the other “possessive” constructions in Swedish.
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