Typology of lexical units in languages (English and native languages) Key points for discussion

Typology of lexical units in languages
(English and native languages)
Key points for discussion:

• 
  Object and aim of lexical typology
  
• 
  Relations of lexical typology with other branches of comparative typology
  
• 
  The notion of lexicon in Linguistics
  
• 
  Sections of lexical typology
  
• 
  Typological categorization within lexical fields and conceptual domains
  

The term “typology”, as is well known, has many different uses. What primarily matters for the present volume is typology understood as “the study of linguistic patterns that are found cross-linguistically, in particular, patterns that can be discovered solely by cross-linguistic comparison”. Typology can also refer to thetypological classification of languages into (structural) types on the basis of particular patterns for particular phenomena. Typological research is driven by the persuasion that the variation across attested (and, further, possible) human languages is severely restricted, and aims therefore at unveiling systematicity behind the whole huge complex of linguistic diversity. In pursuing their tasks, typologists raise - and often try to answer - important theoretical questions, such as:

• 
  According to what parameters does a specific phenomenon vary across languages, in what patterns do these parameters (co-)occur?
  
• 
  What generalisations can be made about attested vs. possible patterns?
  
• 
  What is universal vs. language particular in a given phenomenon, what phenomena are frequent vs. rare?
  
• 
  How are various linguistic phenomena distributed across the languages of the world?
  
• 
  Which phenomena are genetically stable and which are subject to contactinduced change?
  
• 
  How can the attested distribution of the different patterns across languages be explained?
  

• How can the attested cross-linguistic patterns /generalizations be
explained?
The papers in the present volume do in fact focus on linguistic patterns that can be discovered only by cross-linguistic comparison - cross-linguistically recurrent patterns of polysemy, heterosemy and semantic change - and are therefore examples of typological research. The domain of research shared by the papers in the volume is, however, somewhat outside of the main interests of modern typological research, that has so far primarily focused on grammatical and, to a lesser degree, phonetic / phonological phenomena under the labels of “grammatical typology”, “syntactic typology”, “morphological typology”, “morphosyntactic typology” (or, quite often, just “typology”), “phonetic typology” and “phonological typology”. None of those would suit the direction of the volume. We are dealing here with lexical, with semantic phenomena - which is the primary objects of lexical typology. The term “lexical typology” is often used as if there was self-explanatory, but is only rarely explicitly defined. What can be meant by lexical typology is, however, less clear, apart from the evident fact that it involves cross-linguistic research on the lexicon. Many linguists will probably agree with the definition that lexical typology is concerned with the “characteristic ways in which language packages semantic material into words”. Viewed as such, lexical typology can be considered a sub-branch of semantic typology concerned with the lexicon. Other definitions of lexical typology focus on “typologically relevant features in the grammatical structure of the lexicon” or on typologically relevant vs. language-specific patterns of lexicon-grammar interaction.