Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm

Stockholm University | SU · Department of Linguistics

Traditionally, lexical typology has to a large extent been interested in lexical categorization of various cognitive domains (e. g., colour, perception, body), i. e., in how these are cut up by the most important words in a language, and in lexical motivation, or formal relatedness, i. e., in whether words for certain concepts are completely unrela...

This article investigates to what extent the semantics and the phonological forms of lexical items are genealogically inherited or acquired through language contact. We focus on patterns of colexification (the encoding of two concepts with the same word) as an aspect of lexical-semantic organization. We test two pairs of hypotheses. The first pair...

The last decade saw rapid growth of the body of work devoted to relations between social thermoregulation and various other domains, with a particular focus on the connection between prosociality and physical warmth. This paper reports on a first systematic cross-linguistic study of the exponents of conceptual metaphor AFFECTION IS WARMTH (Lakoff &...

This article discusses the development of the contrastive-partitive function of the possessive =eš in colloquial Persian. Examples of colloquial Persian show that the third person singular clitic pronoun =eš in some adnominal possessive constructions does not refer to any obvious referent present either in the syntactic structure (co-text) or in th...

Advances in computer-assisted linguistic research have been greatly influential in reshaping linguistic research. With the increasing availability of interconnected datasets created and curated by researchers, more and more interwoven questions can now be investigated. Such advances, however, are bringing high requirements in terms of rigorousness...

Our study aims to explore how much information about areal patterns of colexification we can gain from lexical databases such as CLICS and ASJP. We adopt a bottom-up (rather than hypothesis-driven) approach, identifying areal patterns in three steps: (i) determine spatial autocorrelations in the data, (ii) identify clusters as candidates for conver...

The whole issue is in free access at https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2017.21.issue-2017/issue-files/lity.2017.21.issue-2017.xml

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to define, exemplify and problematize the lexico-semantic aspects of areality / language convergence. Just as with areal linguistics in general, this subfield is an intersection of a number of more general approaches: the study of language contact, language change and typological research. Particularly promin...

In this chapter we mainly focus on lexical typology understood as cross-linguistic research on domain categorization. We start by introducing some of the critical issues inherent in such research (section 2), and then turn to the presentation and discussion of four different approaches to lexical typology in sections 3–6 (Componential analysis, Nat...

The present issue brings together a cross-section of high-quality lexical-typological work which combines strong empirical results with a spectrum of methodological approaches. It emphasizes the methodological and theoretical concerns of lexical typology and the diversity of the existing and possible approaches within this research area, as well as...

Language comprehension is assumed to proceed incrementally, and comprehenders commit to initial interpretations even in the absence of unambiguous information. Initial ambiguous object arguments are therefore preferably interpreted as subjects, an interpretation that needs to be revised towards an object initial interpretation once the disambiguati...

This article concentrates on two domains in which linguistic typology and language contact can be related to each other: cross-linguistic research on contact-induced change and research on areal phenomena. It also evaluates the extent to which cross-linguistic research on contact phenomena lives up to the standards of the typological enterprise in...

This paper focuses on Swedish nominal compounds with a personal proper name as their first component (PropN-compounds), e.g. en Mozart+sonat 'a Mozart sonata' or Palme+mord-et 'the Palme murder' ('Palme+murder-the'), and aims at showing that such compounds are truly situated between lexicon and syntax. Syntactic considerations are relevant for Prop...

THE ACQUISITION OF DIMINUTIVES: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE. SavickienėIneta and DresslerWolfgang U. (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007. Pp. 352. $162.00 cloth. - Volume 30 Issue 4 - Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm

Although the term "lexical typology" is often used as if it were self-explanatory there is not much consensus on what exactly it can refer to, apart from the evident fact that it involves crosslinguistic research on the lexicon. Many linguists will probably agree with Lehrer's (1992: 249) widely quoted definition that lexical typology is concerned...

The Circum-Baltic area comprises primarily Baltic, Germanic and Slavic languages within Indo-European, Finnic and Saami within Uralic/Finno-Ugrian, as well as the Indo-Aryan language(s) Romani and the Turkic languages Tatar and Karaim. Since time immemorial, it has been an arena for intensive linguistic contacts, but has never been united, either l...

The paper focuses on the main temperature adjectives in Russian and Swedish, which are analysed and compared to each other on the basis of their combinability with nouns. Each of the two linguistic systems is strongly rooted in human experience of temperature. First, temperature attributes are chosen relatively to several temperature values or para...

In this paper we look at the case systems in three Scandinavian vernaculars spoken in Sweden, viz. Elfdalian, Skelleftemål and Vätömål in relation to (i) problems concerning possible case systems and ways in which they can break down; (ii) earlier claims about case hierarchies; (iii) the interaction of case, number and definiteness in nominal parad...

Although humans have inhabited the region around the Baltic Sea at least since the end of the last glacial era, our knowledge about the languages spoken in the area covers a much shorter time span. In historical times, this area was mainly a meeting-place of languages from two linguistic stocks: Indo-European (Baltic, Germanic and Slavic languages)...

0. Introduction Durst's paper is a well-written and clear survey of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) model. However, it strikes us as somewhat over-enthusiastic and slightly simplistic: alternative positions and voices are not present, there is often no deep argumentation for or against a certain position, problems and complications are very...

This paper is an attempt to open a discussion on the topic. 2. Some important concepts and distinctions

By comparing the formal and semantic properties of two structurally different possessive NPs in Maltese, the paper shows that Maltese corroborates cross-linguistic generalizations on the alienability distinction. On the basis of historical data and comparison with other Arabic dialects, it will be argued that the rise of this distinction may be acc...