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Mapping the evolution of the lexicon: Time is ripe to experiment
Georgakopoulos, Athanasios; Polis, Stéphane
201940th Annual Meeting of the Department of Linguistics, School of Philology. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki - April 5-6, 2019
 

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Keywords :
Semantic maps; Egyptian; Greek
Abstract :
[en] A semantic map is a way to visually represent the relationships between meanings based on patterns of co-expression across languages. It is plotted on the basis of cross-linguistic data and it articulates implicational hypotheses that are considered universal as long as they are not contradicted by new empirical evidence (Anderson, 1982; Croft, 2001; Haspelmath, 2003). In this talk, we address one of main pending methodological issues within the semantic map tradition, namely the integration of the diachronic dimension into lexical semantic maps. From a more practical point of view, we argue for the use of complex multi-edge graphs, which can capture directionalities in semantic change as well as diverse types of semantic extension. As a case study, we focus on the semantic extension of time-related lexemes. The principle underlying our choice has been the cross-linguistic availability of the concepts. To achieve cross-linguistic comparability, our point of departure has been the three time-related concepts appearing in the 200 word Swadesh-list (Swadesh, 1950), i.e., DAY/DAYTIME, NIGHT and YEAR. This method ensured also comparability with other studies that used cross-linguistic polysemy data to measure semantic similarity between concepts (Youn et al.,2016). The main body of the talk consists of three parts: a synchronic, a diachronic, and a representational. In the synchronic part, our goal is to identify the cross-linguistic polysemy patterns attested for the three TEMPORAL concepts. In our case, the identification of patterns relied on the language sample included in CLICS2 (List et al., 2018; https://clics.clld.org), which is an online database of synchronic lexical associations that provides information about 2638 distinct polysemy patterns in 1220 language varieties. Based on this dataset, we infer a weighted lexical map of the semantic field of ‘time’, which visualizes the frequency of colexification of each meaning pair. This map is constructed with the help of an adapted version of the algorithm introduced by Regier, Khetarpal, and Majid (2013), and generates more interesting implicational universals than regular colexification networks. Although CLICS2 was designed to also facilitate work in diachronic semantics, the tool does not contain any evolutionary paths of the lexemes. For the diachronic section of our talk, we rely on data that we collected from ancient Greek (8th c. BC – 4th c. AD) and ancient Egyptian (26th c. BC – 10th c. AD). In this section, we report on attested diachronic connections between the meanings identified in the synchronic investigation of the first part. Then, we use these diachronic connections to construct lexical diachronic semantic maps. In order to do so, we resort to an enriched version of the algorithm that we used to plot the synchronic map. This algorithm, designed for inferring oriented edges, turns the undirected graph into a directed one. The resulting diachronic lexical semantic map of the TEMPORAL domain is visualized and analyzed with Cytoscape (Shannon et al. 2003), a powerful open source solution for network visualization and analysis. In Fig. 1, the directed arrows, which represent directionality of change, have been added on the basis of a diachronic analysis of the TEMPORAL concepts in ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian. Different representational conventions are employed in the map for different types of semantic extensions. The talk concludes with a discussion about how visualization techniques and actual semantic analysis can be combined in an instrumental and meaningful way.
Research center :
Mondes anciens - ULiège
Disciplines :
Classical & oriental studies
Languages & linguistics
Author, co-author :
Georgakopoulos, Athanasios ;  Université de Liège - ULiège > Département des sciences de l'antiquité > Département des sciences de l'antiquité
Polis, Stéphane  ;  Université de Liège - ULiège > Département des sciences de l'antiquité > Egyptologie
Language :
English
Title :
Mapping the evolution of the lexicon: Time is ripe to experiment
Publication date :
05 April 2019
Number of pages :
55 slides
Event name :
40th Annual Meeting of the Department of Linguistics, School of Philology. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki - April 5-6, 2019
Event organizer :
Department of Linguistics of the School of Philology
Event place :
Thessaloniki, Greece
Event date :
5-6 April 2019
Audience :
International
Name of the research project :
Le Diasema
Funders :
Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles. Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique - F.R.S.-FNRS
Available on ORBi :
since 15 April 2019

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