The Lexical Typology of Semantic Shifts

✍ Scribed by Päivi Juvonen (editor); Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 608
• Series: Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR]; 58
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The volume focuses on semantic shifts and motivation patterns in the lexicon. Its key feature is its lexico-typological orientation, i.e. a heavy emphasis on systematic cross-linguistic comparison. The book presents current theoretical and methodological trends in the study of semantic shifts and motivational patters based on an abundance of empirical findings across genetically, areally and typologically diverse languages.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of contents
1. “The lexical typology of semantic shifts”: An introduction
2. Meaning change and semantic shifts
3. Semantic shifts as sources of enantiosemy
4. A Frame-based methodology for lexical typology
5. Corpus methods for the investigation of antonyms across languages
6. Studying colexification through massively parallell corpora
7. Polysemy in action: The Swedish verb slå ‘hit, strike, beat’ in a crosslinguistic perspective
8. Making do with minimal lexica. Light verb constructions with make/do in pidgin lexica
9. Extended uses of body-related temperature expressions
10. The semantic domain of emotion in Eskimo and neighbouring languages
11. Motivational scenarios and semantic frames for social relations in Slavic, Romance and Germanic languages – friends, enemies, and others
12. Tree, firewood and fire in the languages of Sahul
13. Investigating lexical motivation in French and Italian
14. Types of motivation in folk plant taxonomies
15. Differences and interactions between scientific and folk biological taxonomy
16. Holistic motivation: Systematization and application to the Cooking domain
17. Motivation by formally analyzable terms in a typological perspective: An assessment of the variation and steps towards explanation
Subject index
Language index
Author index