Wordform Similarity Increases With Semantic Similarity: An Analysis of 100 Languages
Résumé
Although the mapping between form and meaning is often regarded as arbitrary, there are in fact well-known constraints on wordforms which are the result of functional pressures associated with language use and its acquisition. In particular, languages have been shown to encode some meaning distinction in their sound properties that are described to be important for language learning. Here, we investigate the relationship between semantic distance and phonological distance at the large-scale structure of the lexicon. We show evidence in 101 languages from a diverse array of language families that more semantically similar word pairs are also more phonologically
Domaines
Linguistique
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