Chapter I. Lexical typology is the systematic study of cross-linguistic variations

1.2. The significant contribution of lexical typology
Rich Hall, a comedian and actor, amassed a tonne of data in the 1980s huge demonstrate that English did not have words for everything. He amused his audience with "sniglets," which he described as "any term that does not appear in the dictionary but should," in his TV programme and books (such as Hall 1984). Here are some of these ironic ideas that were either put out by Hall himself or by others who later adopted the concept. These "novelty things" demonstrate that not only does our language not have words for everything, but it would also be challenging to describe what "everything" actually means. As an illustration, consider the human hand. What would it be like if every word on it had a meaning? Should the names of the 10 fingers' interiors and exteriors be different? Each knuckle should be given a unique label? Should each of the 10 fingernails and each white semicircle on each nail have its own word?
The English terminology connected to hand are based on two organisational concepts: segmentation and categorization. To segment anything is to divide it into separate components. Because the hand is perceived as separate from the wrist and the arm despite their connection, there is a partonomic choice that led to the development of the word hand. Additionally, we distinguish between the palm and fingers inside the hand. Of course, all of these elements are connected by easily recognisable joints: one divides the hand from the arm, while knuckles separate the fingers from the palm. Thus, segmentation does in part run along the lines present in reality. But there are also joints between the bones of each finger; yet, we do not have a word for each section. Thus, English vocabulary reflects the natural partonomy of the human hand to an extent but it does not follow it down to the last detail: not all parts are graced with a name. In addition to delimiting relevant parts of things, the other tool involved in naming is defining kinds. Both the right hand and the left are called hands as if they were the same thing even though they are not exactly alike. Of the ten digits, each is distinguished from the other by a name – such as pinky, thumb, and so forth – but all of them can also be called fingers. The ten fingers resemble each other and this supports their shared labeling; but why are toes not included in the category? They, too, are similar to fingers in that they are all protrusions on limbs; yet, English does not call toes fingers. This shows that similarity is also a relative concept: we cannot just say that all things that are similar have the same name and those that are different do not. Type–subtype relations (taxonomy) are to a great extent in the eye of the beholder; and, as we saw above, the same holds for whole–part relations (partonomy). If we now look beyond English and consider other languages, these two points jump out even more clearly: both partonomic and taxonomic divisions partially reflect what reality suggests but both concepts are negotiable. For example, in English, there are separate words for ‘arm’ and
‘hand’; in Russian, the two may both be referred to as ruka. Thus, a partonomic split made in English is glossed over in Russian. Conceivable taxonomic splits may also be neglected in vocabulary: as mentioned above, in English, the difference between finger and toe is respected by there being different words for the two, while in Hungarian, it is their similarity that prevails: the same word ujj may be used to refer to either. Reviewing the vocabularies of other languages, we find many other cases as well where partonomic or taxonomic distinctions are alternatively observed or disregarded. Distinctions not respected in English but honored in other languages include examples from German: it has two words for ‘eat’ depending on the eater: essen for humans and fressen for animals. German also has two words for ‘student’: Schüler in lower grades and Student for higher grades including university students. Likewise, Hungarian has distinct words for English sister: older sister is nővér and younger sister is húg. In other cases, it is English that makes a taxonomic According to this understanding, lexical-typological research typically investigates how languages categories specific domains using lexical items e.g., the human body, kinship relationships, color, motion, perception, etc., what criteria underlie categorization, whether languages are completely free to “carve up” the domains at an infinite and arbitrary number of places or whether there are any restrictions on this, and whether any categories are universal for example, say “relative,” For many people, the epitome of lexical typology would be these types of problems, but as will be demonstrated shortly below, lexical typology is far more than that.
Lexico-typological inquiry may also begin with expressions lexemes and inquire as to the many meanings that may be represented by them or by lexemes that are synchronously or diachronically connected to them. Here, the major emphasis is on cross-linguistically common patterns in the relationships between words and lexical items, such as morphological motivation derivational patterns, including compounding and semantic motivation polysemy, semantic associations/semantic shifts see Newman, this volume. Some academics primary focus in lexical typology is once more distinct. In contrast to research that focuses on the semantics of individual lexical items, their configurations in lexical field, or individual processes of word formation, lexical typology, for example, is defined by Lehmann as research that focuses on typologically relevant features in the grammatical structure of the lexicon. This chapter's major focus will be on lexical typology, which can be thought of as cross-linguistic analysis of domain classification. In Section 2, we introduce some of the important problems that such research raises. In Sections 3-6, we describe and examine four distinct lexical typology techniques. While Section 8 outlines a few potential future paths for lexical typology, it is devoted to semantic maps as representations of meanings and generalizations in lexical typology. Theoretical semantics, lexicography, and general typology all have methodological and theoretical goals that must be balanced in some manner for lexical typology to succeed.
Typological study begins with the idea of linguistic variety, presupposes that variation across languages is constrained, and seeks to understand the systematic that lies behind it. Among its primary theoretical concerns are the following: What are the criteria or characteristics that determine how a certain phenomenon differs between languages?
Typological studies require similar data from many different languages in order to be valid. Cross-linguistic identification of the researched phenomena requires a method that assures like-for-like comparisons. Grammatical typology has historically relied heavily on cross-linguistic identification of phenomena for data collecting. However, since the lexicon for the majority of languages in the world is rather little characterized, first-hand sources of data are essential for lexical typology. Although certain lexicon-typological studies primarily rely on dictionaries, the majority of cross-linguistic research on the lexicon is based on elicited data and extra-linguistic stimuli or by the use of questionnaires, which range from straightforward translational questions to far more complex frame-based questionnaires that elicit verbal descriptions of a variety of scenarios cf. Section 6. These are commonly supplemented by corpus studies, and a relatively recent but promising technique for data collecting is the comparison of parallel texts. How the data may be examined and how the findings of the research may be presented are other issues.
It is impossible to overstate the difficulty of developing a consistent meta-language for defining meaning, and particularly lexical meaning. The large gap between theoretical semantics and theoretical lexicology and practical lexicographic practices is also connected to this. The issue of what constitutes meaning—denotation/extension vs sense/descriptive meaning/intention—and the issue of polysemy/semantic generality/vagueness are two of the main roadblocks. Although grasping descriptive meanings, or senses, is what semantic analysis stands for many serious semanticists, lexicographers, and lexicologists, the task can become easily intractable, especially when numerous languages are involved.
Lexical typology has become the subject of systematic study, albeit only on a small number of language samples. These samples are frequently adequate to refute some generalizations about the uniqueness of a given phenomenon and to reveal important cross-linguistic trends.
However, they are scarcely sufficient to reach definitive conclusions about how the different elements interact or to discriminate between universal determinants and those resulting from previous relationships among the languages. Moreover, it is necessary to broaden the scope of systematic lexical typology study to include more linguistic phenomena and more languages. Numerous lexico-typological research has mainly ignored sign languages, in particular. Focusing more on historical processes, particularly on cross-domain semantic changes, that is, on the creation and operation of metaphoric and metonymical word-senses, is a crucial problem facing lexical typology see also Newman, Lemmens, this volume. Although Cognitive Linguistics highlights the universality of many cognitive metaphors, there has been relatively little study on consistent semantic changes across languages. The presence of cross-linguistically repeating patterns is, nevertheless, amply demonstrated here. In addition to the development of cognitive verbs mentioned in, some examples include the investigation into the origins of body-part terms extensive investigation into the motivational patterns underlying numerous varieties of referring expressions, investigation into the metaphorical origins of pain expressions [11, 58].
The traditional structuralism technique is intrinsically static, psycholinguistic tests lack the equipment to capture lexical metaphors, and the school is less interested in the typology of shifts from physical domains due to its emphasis in abstract domains and culture-specific notions. Semantic changes, however, deserve particular consideration even for domain-categorization studies since they offer more hints for comprehending the structure of their parent domain. The source of a semantic shift may also indicate a word-sense, though this does not always hold true. There is a long-standing distinction between lexical typology, which has largely been limited to website by lexical means and without evaluating their grammatical behavior, and grammatical typology, which focuses on the grammatical habits of words and on morph syntactic patterns as encoding meanings. Fortunately, recent advancements in cross linguistic research on domain-categorization show a desire to balance lexical and grammatical concerns and engage in conversation with grammatical theory of language. Parametric conceptual maps employ statistical techniques based on correspondence analysis of similarity matrices, which include instances of certain linguistic phrases like lexemes in a variety of situations across languages. The resultant representations diverge greatly from those taken into account in, while being grounded in the concepts of semantic spaces and semantic maps. The information itself may originate from a variety of sources, such as informants' responses to a specific set of stimuli or specific sentences in parallel texts, which are translations of the same text into other languages. We'll show examples of both strategies below. The denotation-based Nijmegen research on cutting and breaking occurrences provided the earliest example of a bridge probabilistic semantic map. A semantic map is a technique used to visualize represent cross-linguistic similarities in the multi-functionality patterns displayed by semantically and functionally comparable linguistic expressions such as morphemes, words, and constructions of specific languages. The concept is that a single linguistic phrase often has a range of functions uses, meanings, and contexts, and these ranges typically exhibit significant similarities across languages, without necessarily being entirely identical [17, 88].