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

CHAPTER II.
THE CLASSIFICATION OF LEXICAL TYPOLOGY BASED ON SEMANTIC STRUCTURE
2.1. The systematic relations in lexical typology
The systematic study of cross-linguistic variance in words and vocabularies is known as lexical typology. However, opinions on the precise meaning of this relatively new phrase vary. According to Lehrer’s often used definition, lexical typology is concerned with the distinctive ways in which language bundles semantic data into words, and this is likely the case for the majority of linguists as well. Our primary focus will be lexical typology in this understanding. Aside from a few historical studies, lexical typology was formerly both scarce and insignificant in comparison to cross-linguistic study on grammar and phonetics/phonology. However, over the past two decades, there has been an increase in interest in lexical-typological issues, as evidenced by the quantity and variety of pertinent studies and publications that have resulted from them. Several publications have also proposed various definitions of lexical typology, placed it within a larger research field, and provided overviews of the field. It is possible to approach the central question of lexical typology, which is how languages communicate meanings through words, from a variety of angles. Starting with meanings or concepts, we might inquire about how they are conveyed in various linguistic contexts, including, for example, how semantic domains are distributed across lexical items across languages. It provides a clear illustration of this by comparing how differently the inventories of body-part names in six languages discriminate between the hand, arm, foot, and toe using lexicalized, conventionalized phrases [22, 54].
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? What patterns co-occur with these parameters? What conclusions may be drawn on confirmed vs. conceivable patterns? What aspects of a given phenomenon are universal versus language-specific? While interlanguage generalizations are a significant outcome, many typological investigations seek to dig deeper and provide reasons for them. The environmental founded on the characteristics of the physical world, biological formed by human perceptual and cognitive predispositions or simply intrinsic, socio-historical, and cultural are possible explanations for the typological patterns and the generalizations over them. However, it is also necessary to explain how the patterns are distributed throughout the languages, specifically why language X has a certain pattern. These are significant and intriguing concerns that all demand careful consideration, methodological awareness, and, ideally, solid theoretical underpinnings.
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. Just as a word with multiple antonyms typically indicates polysemy, with antonyms corresponding to distinct word-senses that can be represented by separate lexemes in some other language, so too may the source of a semantic shift point out a word-sense. The syntactic and morph syntactic characteristics of words are a related topic. Collocation, valence, case marking, and other forms of thesis realization, as well as various morphological traits like count ability of nouns or verbal aspectual classes, can all be justified by semantics, as is well known in lexicology and lexicography.
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].
In other words, in a semantic map, functions use, meanings, contexts that are frequently connected with the same language expression are shown as nodes that are close to one another or as a continuous region.
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 systematicity 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? What patterns (co-)occur with these parameters? What conclusions may be drawn on confirmed vs. conceivable patterns? What aspects of a given phenomenon are universal versus language-specific? While interlanguage generalizations are a significant outcome, many typological investigations seek to dig deeper and provide reasons for them. Possible explanations for the typological patterns and the generalizations over them may be environmental (rooted in the properties of the real world), biological (shaped by human perceptual and cognitive predispositions or simply innate), socio-historical or cultural. But also the distribution of the patterns across the languages, i.e. why language X has a certain pattern, calls for explanation. These are big and exciting questions, which all presuppose meticulous work, methodological awareness and, ideally, firm theoretical foundations, to which we now turn. Typological research in general is dependent on comparable data coming from (many) different languages. Cross-linguistic identification of studied phenomena presupposes a procedure which ensures that we compare like with like. For data collection and cross-linguistic identification of phenomena, grammatical typology has historically been largely dependent on secondary data sources (such as reference grammars), with first-hand data sources gradually gaining more and more importance. However, for lexical typology first-hand sources of data are crucial, since the lexicon for most languages of the world is relatively poorly described. Although some lexico typological studies use dictionaries as their main source, most of the cross-linguistic research on the lexicon is based on elicited data – either by extra-linguistic stimuli or by means of questionnaires, ranging from simple translational questionnaires to much more sophisticated ‘frame-based’ questionnaires, which elicit verbal descriptions of various situations. These are frequently complemented by corpus studies, with comparison of parallel texts (translations of one and the same text) as a relatively new but promising method for data collection. One particularly prominent feature of the lexicon as compared to grammar is its vastness and diversity, which creates additional challenges for both data collection and analysis (compare such culturally specific and subjective notions as emotions with the much more “visible” events of cutting and breaking.