Patterns of Closeness and Abstractness in Colexifications: The Case of Indigenous Languages in the Americas
This addresses the interdisciplinary problem of concept concreteness/abstractness in linguistics and cognitive sciences, but it is incremental as it applies an existing hypothesis to a new dataset.
The study tested the hypothesis that concepts closer in concreteness/abstractness are more likely to colexify, finding support for this pattern across indigenous languages in the Americas.
Colexification refers to linguistic phenomena where multiple concepts (meanings) are expressed by the same lexical form, such as polysemy or homophony. Colexifications have been found to be pervasive across languages and cultures. The problem of concreteness/abstractness of concepts is interdisciplinary, studied from a cognitive standpoint in linguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, neurophysiology, etc. In this paper, we hypothesize that concepts that are closer in concreteness/abstractness are more likey to colexify, and we test the hypothesis across indigenous languages in Americas.