none 10.1075/slcs.106.09fra John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 67866867 1421202 1421186 202507031636000043 10.1075 2025-07-03T14:35:36Z 2014-03-24T07:41:33Z 115 0165-7763 10.1075/slcs https://benjamins.com/ catalog/slcs Martine Vanhove Llacan (Inalco, CNRS), Fédération TUL Towards a typology of lexical semantic associations This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies. 106 11 21 2008 11 14 2008 9789027205735 9789027290328 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/slcs.106 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027290328 https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027290328.pdf https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/slcs.106/html Alexandre François Lacito (CNRS), Fédération TUL https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1947-0806 Building upon the model of Semantic Maps (Haspelmath 2003), which typologists have designed mainly for grammatical semantics, this chapter discusses methodological issues for a model in lexical typology. By breaking up polysemous lexemes of various languages into their semantic “atoms” or senses, one defines an etic grid against which cross-linguistic comparison can be undertaken. Languages differ as to which senses they colexify , i.e., lexify identically. But while each polysemous lexeme as a whole is language-specific, individual pairings of colexified senses can be compared across languages. Our model, understood as an empirical, atomistic approach to lexical typology, is finally exemplified with the rich polysemies associated with the notion “breathe”. Intertwined together, they compose a single, universal network of potential semantic extensions. 11 21 2008 11 14 2008 163 215 10.1075/slcs.106.09fra https://benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.106.09fra https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/slcs.106.09fra/html