Concept features and lexical diversity. A dialectological case study on the relationship between meaning and variation

This dissertation focuses on lexical diversity, the amount of lexical variation that a concept shows, in the dialects of Dutch. Lexical diversity can differ between concepts. For the concept 'drunk', for instance, nearly 3000 English expressions exist, including blitzed, intoxicated, hammered and I’m not as think as you drunk I am (Dickson 2009, cited in Lillo 2009). For the concept 'sober', however, a significantly smaller number of lexical items are available, like sober or abstinent. As is apparent from this example, variation in lexical diversity is influenced by the meaning of the concepts to be expressed: concepts that are prone to taboo show more variation. The finding that meaning influences lexical diversity was first confirmed on a large scale in three pilot studies (Geeraerts & Speelman 2010, Speelman & Geeraerts 2007, 2008). Importantly, however, these pilot studies not only inquired into the proneness to taboo of a particular concept, but showed that other types of meaning-related concept features (viz. features that concern the prototypical organization of the lexicon) significantly affect lexical diversity as well. Nonetheless, as these pilot studies only focused on one dialect area, viz. the Limburgish dialect area, and only took into account one universal semantic field, viz. the field of concepts relating to the human body, the extent to which these features are also relevant in other datasets has not yet been examined.

In this dissertation, four case studies are presented that examine the relationship between lexical diversity and meaning in different ways. In part 1, we show that cognitive concept features, related to the maximalist view on meaning of the Cognitive Linguistics paradigm, affect the amount of variation a concept shows. The main aim of the first case study, outlined in chapter 3, is to confirm that concept features related to the prototype-theoretical organization of the lexicon influence the amount of variation a concept shows in other datasets than were used in the pilot studies. More specifically, we examine the influence of these features on six semantic fields (the human body, the house, celebration & entertainment, personality & feelings, family & sexuality and society, school & education) of the digitized databases of the Dictionaries of the Brabantic and Limburgish Dialects. The analysis shows that the results of the pilot studies are the same in other dialectal data and in other semantic fields: less salient, more vague and affect-sensitive concepts are characterized by significantly more lexical diversity. Additionally, we elaborate on the results of the pilot studies by selecting semantic fields organized along two dimensions (viz. concreteness and universal versus society-related versus locally bound concepts). This indicates that these dimensions affect the relative impact of the concept features between semantic fields.

In the second case study, presented in chapter 4, we inquire into the effect of these concept features on the different aspects of lexical diversity in dialect data, viz. the number of unique types that are available per concept, on the one hand, and the extent to which these types are heterogeneously scattered across geographical space, on the other. The results of the regression models indicate that the effect of the concept features is relevant for every aspect of lexical diversity. However, some predictors play a larger role for the number of unique types (viz. affect and, to a lesser extent, onomasiological vagueness), while onomasiological salience seems to influence the geographical spread of the lexical variants more. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that the fact that the data are geographically stratified is not the only reason why the concept features reached significance in the first case study (chapter 3).

In part 2, we take into account the fact that concept-related features can differ between language users. More specifically, we examine the extent to which the experiential and usage-based nature of meaning is reflected in lexical diversity between dialect speakers from different locations. Chapter 5 investigates how the interaction between semantic features and lectal differences is reflected in the types of lexical variants that are used in different locations. In practice, we inquire into the usage of non-native variants from three source languages (viz. French, Latin and German) in four semantic fields (society, school & education, personality & feelings, church & religion and clothing & personal hygiene) in the Brabantic and Limburgish dialect area. The results indicate that we find geographical and semantic structure in the lexical variants that are used: loanwords are not used at random. The data show clear differences between the source languages and between the semantic fields. Although these results corroborate previous findings, this case study contributes to contact linguistic research in Cognitive Sociolinguistics as it is one of the first to simultaneously investigate differences between source languages and in different semantic fields on a large scale using quantitative inferential techniques (viz. Generalized Additive Modelling).

In chapter 6, finally, we examine to what extent an experience-based characteristic of a concept, viz. experiential salience, correlates with lexical diversity. We rely on extra-linguistic, objective frequency counts of plants that occur naturally in the northern part of Belgium to gauge the experiential salience of a plant. The analysis shows that experiential salience correlates with lexical diversity: the more frequently a plant occurs in the everyday environment of a language user, the smaller the amount of unique types that are available, given the amount of tokens. However, as indicated in the discussion, experiential frequency alone does not cause complete lexical homogeneity in the speech community: dialect speakers not only need to encounter a plant frequently in their everyday environment, but they need to talk about it as well.

Overall, then, this dissertation contributes to the field of lexical semantics from a Cognitive Sociolinguistics perspective. It shows how, through the use of quantitative techniques on a semantically diverse dataset, aspects of the structure of lexical diversity are revealed and how an examination of dialectological data can contribute to theoretical linguistics.