The term colexification has become an important concept in lexical typology in particular and linguistic typology in general. Surprisingly, it is not consistenly used by all scholars in the field. Instead, two main interpretations have emerged, a broad version that uses colexification as a cover term for polysemy, vagueness, and homophony, and a narrow version that restricts the term to polysemy and vagueness. We discuss the ambiguity and reflect about the usefulness of introducing alternative terms instead.
Tag Archives: colexification
Retrieving and Analyzing Taste Colexifications from Lexibank
Colexifications have enjoyed a considerable amount of popularity in the recent years. However, there are still many semantic domains, where not much research on colexification patterns has been carried out so far. Here we show, how the recently published Lexibank repository can be queried to yield colexification data on taste colexifications which can in turn be easily plotted on geographic maps.
How to Compute Colexification Networks with CL Toolkit (How to do X in Linguistics 11)
A colexification network is a network consisting of concepts as nodes with weighted edges drawn between the nodes, indicating how often the concepts colexify across the data in a given sample of languages. Having seen how individual colexifications can be computed with the help of the CL Toolkit package in an earlier blog post, we will now see how this code needs to be extended in order to compute colexification networks.