Semantic maps and temperature: Capturing the lexicon-grammar interface across languages

Abstract

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 unrelated or related to others via polysemy or derivation (e. g., intransitive vs. transitive verbs, words for ‘day’ and ‘sun’, etc.). Grammatical behavior of words and morphosyntactic patterns as encoding meanings traditionally belong to grammatical typology. In this paper, I consider the domain of temperature and show how the close interaction between lexicon and grammar in the encoding of the temperature domain across languages calls for an integrated lexico-grammatical approach to these phenomena. As a useful tool for such an enterprise I suggest an elaborated semantic map comprising three layers – the layer specifying the words with the information on their mutual formal relations (i. e., whether they are identical, completely unrelated or related via derivation or inflection), their morphosyntactic properties (e. g., their part-of-speech affiliation, inflectional potential, etc.), and the constructions they occur in.