Tag Archives: discussion

The Ambiguity of the Colexification Term

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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.

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Biological metaphors and methods in historical linguistics (1): Introduction

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Evolutionary biology and historical linguistics share a long history of scientific exchange, reflected both not only in the sharing and transfer of metaphors but more recently also in the transfer of methods. Already Charles Darwin claimed that both species and languages evolve in tree-like patterns, and linguists, like Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, used terms like “sprachliche[n] Biologie” (‘linguistic biology’) when referring to the history of languages (Meyer-Lübke 1890, x). While the discipline of historical-comparative linguistics allowed biologists to adopt evolutionary thought against religious dogma in the late 19th century (Wells 1987: 54), it was biological applications which opened up the possibility of large quantitative studies in linguistics based on computational approaches (Geisler and List 2013, 111).

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