As part of our ongoing endeavour to expand the possible mappings in Concepticon, I introduce an extended concept list of Vietnamese based on the Intercontinental Dictionary Series (IDS). The list includes elicitation glosses for 1,310 concepts that can be used as a reference to add more data or for comparative analyses. Here, I present the creation of the list and its content.
Many words have multiple meanings, especially words for body parts. Some languages call the branch of a tree arm and others refer to the roof with the word head. These are instances of colexifications between body and object concepts and they occur across various languages. However, languages vary in terms of the frequency of body~object colexifications in their lexicon. It is, therefore, important to understand the different drivers that can lead to body~object colexifications. One possible factor to consider is the degree of how visually conspicuous a part of the body is. In an ongoing project, I investigate the role of visual salience as a driving force behind body~object colexifications. This blog post gives a brief overview and introduces the concept list that is the basis for my study.
In a recent blogpost (Tjuka 2021), I introduced a list of color, emotion, and human body part concepts. The list is the basis for a study on colexifications across three semantic domains. The first version of the list included 192 concepts. Of these concepts, 34 were from the emotion domain. We decided to add 28 additional emotion concepts to the list because this will allow us to further improve our analysis and compare our results with previous studies on emotion semantics. This blog post introduces the extended list.
This is a joint post by Fabrício Ferraz Gerardi, Carolina Coelho Aragon, and Stanislav Reichert.
Whereas the choice of vocabulary needed for analyses in computational historical linguistics is often determined by criteria like stability and resistance to borrowing, one might also be interested in culturally relevant concepts because of their value for reconstructing the proto-culture and even population movements of individual language families. Having striven to find concepts to which these criteria apply within the Tupían language family, we came up with a list of 447 concepts. This post presents the complete list and then briefly illustrates some of the criteria employed in choosing them.
Color, emotion, and human body parts are often considered universal semantic domains. However, cross-linguistic comparison of the connections within each of the domains reveals interesting differences across languages (e.g., Jackson et al. 2019). Researchers in lexical typology systematically collect the names for colors, emotions, and human body parts across various languages and analyze the principles of how naming patterns evolve. Using the same word for multiple concepts or colexification, for example, Vietnamese xanh denoting the colors green and blue, is often discussed in those studies. To study the colexifications across the three semantic domains color, emotion, and human body part, we need a set of comparable concepts. This blog post introduces a list of 192 concepts across all three domains based on the available concept sets in Concepticon (List et al. 2016, 2021).
