Concept features in lexical dialectometry.

There are many words for the concept “death”, like die, pass away, or go the way of all flesh, but few for the concept “birth”. For linguists, a simple observation of this kind this raises two major questions. First, what type of concepts exhibit this variety? In the example, negative emotions seem to play a role, but what other features could have the same effect? Could it be e.g. that concepts from a contemporary, global culture show less variation than older ones? Or that concepts that are more vague and abstract lead to more varied naming than more concrete ones?  Second, how does this variation relate to the variability that we find across varieties of the same language? Dialects e.g. may differ in the words they use for a given concept, but are these differences bigger for a concept like “death” than for one like “birth”? To answer these scarcely studied questions, we shall collect relevant data from Dutch dialects and from Austrian-German dialects. Specifically, we shall use digitized compendia of lexical variation, viz. the Woordenboek van de Limburgse Dialecten, the Woordenboek van de Brabantse Dialecten, and the Wörterbuch and the Datenbank der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich. The use of digital sources will facilitate an analysis of the complexities of the data, in particular, it supports the use of advanced statistical techniques as developed in dialectometry (i.e. the branch of linguistics in which researchers quantify the differences among dialects).