The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2024
This paper explores how three cognitive and perceptual cues, vocal iconicity, resemblance-based m... more This paper explores how three cognitive and perceptual cues, vocal iconicity, resemblance-based mappings between form and meaning, and segment position and lexical stress, interact to affect word formation and language processing. The study combines an analysis of the word-internal positions that iconic segments occur in based on data from 245 language families with an experimental study in which participants representing more than 30 languages rated iconic and non-iconic pseudowords. The pseudowords were designed to systematically vary segment and stress placement across syllables. The results for study 1 indicate that segments used iconically appear approximately 0.26 segment positions closer toward the beginning of words compared to non-iconic segments. In study 2, it was found that iconic segments occurring in stressed syllables and non-iconic segments occurring in the second syllable were rated as significantly more fitting. These findings suggest that the interplay between vocal iconicity and prominence effects increases the predictive function of iconic segments by foregrounding sounds, which intrinsically carry semantic information. Consequently, these results contribute to the understanding of the widespread occurrence of vocal iconicity in human languages.
Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic ju... more Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per l...
Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic ju... more Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per language remained within ±2% after accounting for confounds related to familiarity and voice quality of individual speakers. None of the tested phonetic features—the presence of specific phonemic classes, the overall size of phonetic repertoire, its typicality and similarity to the listener’s first language—were robust predictors of pleasantness ratings, apart from a possible slight preference for nontonal languages. While population-level phonesthetic preferences may exist, their contribution to perceptual judgments of short speech recordings appears to be minor compared to purely personal preferences, the speaker’s voice quality, and perceived resemblance to other languages culturally branded as beautiful or ugly.
While recent years have seen a substantial increase of studies investigating vocal iconicity in t... more While recent years have seen a substantial increase of studies investigating vocal iconicity in the lexicon of spoken languages, its presence in grammatical structures is poorly understood. This study investigates the presence of vocal iconicity in nominal classification systems by collecting nominal classification devices from the two main system types: 210 non-agreeing languages (126 families) and 151 agreeing languages (123 families). To detect overrepresentations of sound types in class meanings, the nominal classification devices were grouped according to comparable semantic categories, transcribed using comparable phonetic system, and analyzed through Bayesian mixed models. The strongest results were found for associations between nominal classification devices denoting flat and low, front, unrounded vowels, along with several weak associations relating to shape/size/quantity, function, humanness/animacy, and sex. These associations mostly correlate with previous vocal iconici...
Script for analyzing sound stability, iconic value, and earlier and later in first language acqui... more Script for analyzing sound stability, iconic value, and earlier and later in first language acquisition
In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among ba... more In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and 'blind' to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates...
Combined data set, sound stability, iconic value, and earlier and later in first language acquisi... more Combined data set, sound stability, iconic value, and earlier and later in first language acquisition
Languages contain thousands of words each and are made up by a seemingly endless collection of so... more Languages contain thousands of words each and are made up by a seemingly endless collection of sound combinations. Yet a subsection of these show clear signs of corresponding word shapes for the same meanings which is generally known as vocal iconicity and sound symbolism. This dissertation explores the boundaries of sound symbolism in the lexicon from typological, functional and evolutionary perspectives in an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the role sound symbolism plays in human language. In order to achieve this, the subject in question was triangulated by investigating different methodologies which included lexical data from a large number of language families, experiment participants and robust statistical tests.Study I investigates basic vocabulary items in a large number of language families in order to establish the extent of sound symbolic items in the core of the lexicon, as well as how the sound-meaning associations are mapped and interconnected. This study ...
This volume addresses five different Dimensions of Iconicity. While some contributions examine th... more This volume addresses five different Dimensions of Iconicity. While some contributions examine the phonic dimensions of iconicity that are based on empirical, diachronic and theoretical work, others explore the function of similarity from a cognitive point of view. The section on multimodal dimensions takes into account philosophical, linguistic and literary perspectives in order to analyse, for example the diagrammatic interplay of written texts and images. Contributions on performative dimensions of iconicity focus on Buddhist mantras, Hollywood films, and the dynamics of rhetorical structures in Shakespeare. Last but not least, the volume also addresses new ways of considering iconicity, including notational iconicity, the interplay of iconicity, ambiguity, interpretability, and the iconicity of literary analysis from a formal semanticist point of view.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021
In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among ba... more In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and ‘blind’ to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates with ic...
Experimental and cross-linguistic studies have shown that vocal iconicity is prevalent in words t... more Experimental and cross-linguistic studies have shown that vocal iconicity is prevalent in words that carry meanings related to size and shape. Although these studies demonstrate the importance of vocal iconicity and reveal the cognitive biases underpinning it, there is less work demonstrating how these biases lead to the evolution of a sound symbolic lexicon in the first place. In this study, we show how words can be shaped by cognitive biases through cultural evolution. Using a simple experimental setup resembling the game telephone, we examined how a single word form changed as it was passed from one participant to the next by a process of immediate iterated learning. About 1,500 naïve participants were recruited online and divided into five condition groups. The participants in the control-group received no information about the meaning of the word they were about to hear, while the participants in the remaining four groups were informed that the word meant either big or small (w...
We investigated possible motivations for sound symbolism in spatial demonstratives within 101 are... more We investigated possible motivations for sound symbolism in spatial demonstratives within 101 areally and genetically diverse languages. Six different predictions were formulated on the basis of factors such as (a) semiotic ground (iconic, indexical or combined), (b) speaker-centered, hearer-centered or both and (c) applicable to vowels, consonants or both. Each one of these six predictions resulted in different expected scales of phonemes on the proximal-distal dimension. Languages which conformed to these scales were regarded as motivated (according to a particular prediction). Languages which opposed it were treated as reverse, and if neither was the case, as neutral. The results showed significant motivated/reverse and motivated/neutral ratios only for the prediction based on vowel-frequency, motivated by a combination of iconic and indexical factors, and marginal support for the other predictions concerning vowels. The two predictions based on an assumed link between preverbal ...
Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. Howev... more Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. However, as previous studies have either been lacking in scope or in phonetic granularity, the present study investigates the phonetic and semantic features involved from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the phonemes of 344 near-universal concepts in 245 language families, we establish 125 sound-meaning associations. The results also show that between 19 and 40 of the items of the Swadesh-100 list are sound symbolic, which calls into question the list’s ability to determine genetic relationships. In addition, by combining co-occurring semantic and phonetic features between the sound symbolic concepts, 20 macro-concepts can be identified, e. g. basic descriptors, deictic distinctions and kinship attributes. Furthermore, all identified macro-concepts can be grounded in four types of sound symbolism: (a) unimodal imitation (onomatopoeia); (b) cross-modal imitation (vocal gestures); (c) diag...
This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 ... more This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 Indo-European languages. We partition types of change (i.e., gain or loss) for each variant according to whether they bring about a simplification in morphosyntactic patterns that must be learned, whether they are neutral (i.e., neither simplifying nor introducing complexity) or whether they introduce a more complex pattern. We find that changes which introduce complexity show significantly less areal signal (according to a metric we devise) than changes which simplify and neutral changes, but we find no significant differences between the latter two groups. This result is compatible with a scenario where certain types of parallel change are more likely to be mediated by advergence and contact between proximate speech communities, while other developments are due purely to drift and are largely independent of intercultural contact.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2024
This paper explores how three cognitive and perceptual cues, vocal iconicity, resemblance-based m... more This paper explores how three cognitive and perceptual cues, vocal iconicity, resemblance-based mappings between form and meaning, and segment position and lexical stress, interact to affect word formation and language processing. The study combines an analysis of the word-internal positions that iconic segments occur in based on data from 245 language families with an experimental study in which participants representing more than 30 languages rated iconic and non-iconic pseudowords. The pseudowords were designed to systematically vary segment and stress placement across syllables. The results for study 1 indicate that segments used iconically appear approximately 0.26 segment positions closer toward the beginning of words compared to non-iconic segments. In study 2, it was found that iconic segments occurring in stressed syllables and non-iconic segments occurring in the second syllable were rated as significantly more fitting. These findings suggest that the interplay between vocal iconicity and prominence effects increases the predictive function of iconic segments by foregrounding sounds, which intrinsically carry semantic information. Consequently, these results contribute to the understanding of the widespread occurrence of vocal iconicity in human languages.
Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic ju... more Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per l...
Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic ju... more Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per language remained within ±2% after accounting for confounds related to familiarity and voice quality of individual speakers. None of the tested phonetic features—the presence of specific phonemic classes, the overall size of phonetic repertoire, its typicality and similarity to the listener’s first language—were robust predictors of pleasantness ratings, apart from a possible slight preference for nontonal languages. While population-level phonesthetic preferences may exist, their contribution to perceptual judgments of short speech recordings appears to be minor compared to purely personal preferences, the speaker’s voice quality, and perceived resemblance to other languages culturally branded as beautiful or ugly.
While recent years have seen a substantial increase of studies investigating vocal iconicity in t... more While recent years have seen a substantial increase of studies investigating vocal iconicity in the lexicon of spoken languages, its presence in grammatical structures is poorly understood. This study investigates the presence of vocal iconicity in nominal classification systems by collecting nominal classification devices from the two main system types: 210 non-agreeing languages (126 families) and 151 agreeing languages (123 families). To detect overrepresentations of sound types in class meanings, the nominal classification devices were grouped according to comparable semantic categories, transcribed using comparable phonetic system, and analyzed through Bayesian mixed models. The strongest results were found for associations between nominal classification devices denoting flat and low, front, unrounded vowels, along with several weak associations relating to shape/size/quantity, function, humanness/animacy, and sex. These associations mostly correlate with previous vocal iconici...
Script for analyzing sound stability, iconic value, and earlier and later in first language acqui... more Script for analyzing sound stability, iconic value, and earlier and later in first language acquisition
In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among ba... more In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and 'blind' to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates...
Combined data set, sound stability, iconic value, and earlier and later in first language acquisi... more Combined data set, sound stability, iconic value, and earlier and later in first language acquisition
Languages contain thousands of words each and are made up by a seemingly endless collection of so... more Languages contain thousands of words each and are made up by a seemingly endless collection of sound combinations. Yet a subsection of these show clear signs of corresponding word shapes for the same meanings which is generally known as vocal iconicity and sound symbolism. This dissertation explores the boundaries of sound symbolism in the lexicon from typological, functional and evolutionary perspectives in an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the role sound symbolism plays in human language. In order to achieve this, the subject in question was triangulated by investigating different methodologies which included lexical data from a large number of language families, experiment participants and robust statistical tests.Study I investigates basic vocabulary items in a large number of language families in order to establish the extent of sound symbolic items in the core of the lexicon, as well as how the sound-meaning associations are mapped and interconnected. This study ...
This volume addresses five different Dimensions of Iconicity. While some contributions examine th... more This volume addresses five different Dimensions of Iconicity. While some contributions examine the phonic dimensions of iconicity that are based on empirical, diachronic and theoretical work, others explore the function of similarity from a cognitive point of view. The section on multimodal dimensions takes into account philosophical, linguistic and literary perspectives in order to analyse, for example the diagrammatic interplay of written texts and images. Contributions on performative dimensions of iconicity focus on Buddhist mantras, Hollywood films, and the dynamics of rhetorical structures in Shakespeare. Last but not least, the volume also addresses new ways of considering iconicity, including notational iconicity, the interplay of iconicity, ambiguity, interpretability, and the iconicity of literary analysis from a formal semanticist point of view.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021
In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among ba... more In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and ‘blind’ to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates with ic...
Experimental and cross-linguistic studies have shown that vocal iconicity is prevalent in words t... more Experimental and cross-linguistic studies have shown that vocal iconicity is prevalent in words that carry meanings related to size and shape. Although these studies demonstrate the importance of vocal iconicity and reveal the cognitive biases underpinning it, there is less work demonstrating how these biases lead to the evolution of a sound symbolic lexicon in the first place. In this study, we show how words can be shaped by cognitive biases through cultural evolution. Using a simple experimental setup resembling the game telephone, we examined how a single word form changed as it was passed from one participant to the next by a process of immediate iterated learning. About 1,500 naïve participants were recruited online and divided into five condition groups. The participants in the control-group received no information about the meaning of the word they were about to hear, while the participants in the remaining four groups were informed that the word meant either big or small (w...
We investigated possible motivations for sound symbolism in spatial demonstratives within 101 are... more We investigated possible motivations for sound symbolism in spatial demonstratives within 101 areally and genetically diverse languages. Six different predictions were formulated on the basis of factors such as (a) semiotic ground (iconic, indexical or combined), (b) speaker-centered, hearer-centered or both and (c) applicable to vowels, consonants or both. Each one of these six predictions resulted in different expected scales of phonemes on the proximal-distal dimension. Languages which conformed to these scales were regarded as motivated (according to a particular prediction). Languages which opposed it were treated as reverse, and if neither was the case, as neutral. The results showed significant motivated/reverse and motivated/neutral ratios only for the prediction based on vowel-frequency, motivated by a combination of iconic and indexical factors, and marginal support for the other predictions concerning vowels. The two predictions based on an assumed link between preverbal ...
Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. Howev... more Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. However, as previous studies have either been lacking in scope or in phonetic granularity, the present study investigates the phonetic and semantic features involved from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the phonemes of 344 near-universal concepts in 245 language families, we establish 125 sound-meaning associations. The results also show that between 19 and 40 of the items of the Swadesh-100 list are sound symbolic, which calls into question the list’s ability to determine genetic relationships. In addition, by combining co-occurring semantic and phonetic features between the sound symbolic concepts, 20 macro-concepts can be identified, e. g. basic descriptors, deictic distinctions and kinship attributes. Furthermore, all identified macro-concepts can be grounded in four types of sound symbolism: (a) unimodal imitation (onomatopoeia); (b) cross-modal imitation (vocal gestures); (c) diag...
This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 ... more This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 Indo-European languages. We partition types of change (i.e., gain or loss) for each variant according to whether they bring about a simplification in morphosyntactic patterns that must be learned, whether they are neutral (i.e., neither simplifying nor introducing complexity) or whether they introduce a more complex pattern. We find that changes which introduce complexity show significantly less areal signal (according to a metric we devise) than changes which simplify and neutral changes, but we find no significant differences between the latter two groups. This result is compatible with a scenario where certain types of parallel change are more likely to be mediated by advergence and contact between proximate speech communities, while other developments are due purely to drift and are largely independent of intercultural contact.
Database and dataset descriptions for Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics Online. Data is... more Database and dataset descriptions for Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics Online. Data is available on https://diacl.ht.lu.se/
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B, 2021
One contribution of 17 to a theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'. In speech, the co... more One contribution of 17 to a theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'. In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form-meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in prehistoric language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and 'blind' to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates with iconic occurrence in the global set. Further, we find that sound stability and iconic occurrence of consonants are connected to acquisition order in the first language, indicating that children acquiring language play a role in maintaining vocal iconicity over time. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.
Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. Howev... more Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. However, as previous studies have either been lacking in scope or in phonetic granularity, the present study investigates the phonetic and semantic features involved from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the phonemes of 344 near-universal concepts in 245 language families, we establish 125 sound-meaning associations. The results also show that between 19 and 40 of the items of the Swadesh-100 list are sound symbolic, which calls into question the list's ability to determine genetic relationships. In addition, by combining co-occurring semantic and phonetic features between the sound symbolic concepts, 20 macro-concepts can be identified, e. g. basic descriptors, deictic distinctions and kinship attributes. Furthermore, all identified macro-concepts can be grounded in four types of sound symbolism: (a) unimodal imitation (onomatopoeia); (b) cross-modal imitation (vocal gestures); (c) dia-grammatic mappings based on relation (relative); or (d) situational mappings (circumstantial). These findings show that sound symbolism is rooted in the human perception of the body and its interaction with the surrounding world,
Talking Neolithic: Proceedings of the workshop on Indo-European origins held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, December 2-3, 2013. Edited by Guus Kroonen, James P. Mallory and Bernard Comrie. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No.65. , 2019
In this paper, we have investigated, by means of quantitative and statistical methods, stability ... more In this paper, we have investigated, by means of quantitative and statistical methods, stability and change in cultural vocabulary of Indo-European in Europe, with a focus on agriculture. For this purpose we have created a culture vocabulary list with lexical head words, organized into subcategories based on their role and function in a cultural system, the purpose of which is to give a representative selection of culture vocabulary terms for a specific system and a certain geographic area. Thereupon, we have collected data from a number of Indo-European languages of Europe, removed languages with too little data, omitted post-colonial borrowings, organized the lexemes into cognate sets and divided lexemes according to whether they are inherited (reconstructed or derived from Proto-Indo-European roots), loaned, or have an uncertain origin. For each term we have kept track of number of cognates, number of lexemes in languages, as well as number of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European roots. The data sets were analyzed by the R statistical tool, basically by means of principal component analysis biplots, but also by calculating standardized residuals for each of the terms and the subgroups. The results demonstrated that there is, from a geographical perspective, relatively little convergence effect on cultural vocabulary. Further, we could see a clear tendency in which manufactured objects (implements, produce) as well as the activities accompanying them (activities) were inherited to a larger extent, whereas objects belonging to the environment (game), as well as the cultural environment (domestic animals, produce) was much more uncertain. The category of predator was most loaned in our set, which could, to a certain extent, be due to the inclusion of partly non-European species. We were also able to identify a stable core vocabulary, consisting mainly of implements, some produce and domestic animal terms, which were rich in cognates and leaning towards being inherited. 1 We acknowledge Rob Verhoeven and Guus Kroonen for valuable remarks.
This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 ... more This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 Indo-European languages. We partition types of change (i.e., gain or loss) for each variant according to whether they bring about a simplification in morphosyntactic patterns that must be learned, whether they are neutral (i.e., neither simplifying nor introducing complexity) or whether they introduce a more complex pattern. We find that changes which introduce complexity show significantly less areal signal (according to a metric we devise) than changes which simplify and neutral changes, but we find no significant differences between the latter two groups. This result is compatible with a scenario where certain types of parallel change are more likely to be mediated by advergence and contact between proximate speech communities, while other developments are due purely to drift and are largely independent of intercultural contact.
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Papers by Niklas Erben Johansson