Investigating Lexical Change through Cross-Linguistic Colexification Patterns
This research addresses the challenge of modeling lexical change for linguists and computational linguists, but it is incremental as it applies existing phylogenetic methods to new data.
The study tackled the problem of understanding how and why meanings evolve in languages by analyzing colexification patterns across three language families, finding that closely related concept pairs are more colexified and change slower, while frequent and borrowable pairs change faster and are less colexified, with differences between families indicating areal and cultural influences.
One of the most intriguing features of language is its constant change, with ongoing shifts in how meaning is expressed. Despite decades of research, the factors that determine how and why meanings evolve remain only partly understood. Colexification -- the phenomenon of expressing multiple distinct concepts using the same word form -- serves as a valuable window onto the dynamics of meaning change across languages. Here, we apply phylogenetic comparative models to dictionary data from three language families, Austronesian, Indo-European, and Uralic, in order to shed light on the evolutionary dynamics underlying the colexification of concept pairs. We assess the effects of three predictors: associativity, borrowability, and usage frequency. Our results show that more closely related concept pairs are colexified across a larger portion of the family tree and exhibit slower rates of change. In contrast, concept pairs that are more frequent and more prone to borrowing tend to change more rapidly and are less often colexified. We also find considerable differences between the language families under study, suggesting that areal and cultural factors may play a role.