On the universal structure of human lexical semantics

Youn, Hyejin; Sutton, Logan; Smith, Eric; Moore, Cristopher; Wilkins, Jon F.; Maddieson, Ian; Croft, William; Bhattacharya, Tanmoy

doi:10.1073/pnas.1520752113

On the universal structure of human lexical semantics

Journal Article · Mon Feb 01 00:00:00 EST 2016 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1520752113· OSTI ID:1329683

^[1]; Sutton, Logan ^[2]; Smith, Eric ^[3]; Moore, Cristopher ^[4]; Wilkins, Jon F. ^[5]; Maddieson, Ian ^[6]; Croft, William ^[7]; ^[8]

Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Oxford (United Kingdom); Univ. of Oxford, Oxford (United Kingdom); Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM (United States)
Indiana Univ., Bloomington, IN (United States)
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM (United States); Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo (Japan)
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM (United States)
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM (United States); Ronin Institute, Montclair, NJ (United States)
Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM (United States); Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM (United States); Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition. Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to the underlying conceptual structure, but meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize. Here, we provide an empirical measure of semantic proximity between concepts using cross-linguistic dictionaries to translate words to and from languages carefully selected to be representative of worldwide diversity. These translations reveal cases where a particular language uses a single “polysemous” word to express multiple concepts that another language represents using distinct words. We use the frequency of such polysemies linking two concepts as a measure of their semantic proximity and represent the pattern of these linkages by a weighted network. This network is highly structured: Certain concepts are far more prone to polysemy than others, and naturally interpretable clusters of closely related concepts emerge. Statistical analysis of the polysemies observed in a subset of the basic vocabulary shows that these structural properties are consistent across different language groups, and largely independent of geography, environment, and the presence or absence of a literary tradition. As a result, the methods developed here can be applied to any semantic domain to reveal the extent to which its conceptual structure is, similarly, a universal attribute of human cognition and language use.

View Accepted Manuscript (DOE)

Research Organization:: Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: Santa Fe Institute; USDOE

Grant/Contract Number:: AC52-06NA25396

OSTI ID:: 1329683

Report Number(s):: LA-UR--15-23327

Journal Information:: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Journal Name: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Journal Issue: 7 Vol. 113; ISSN 0027-8424

Publisher:: National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC (United States)Copyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

References (30)

Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns Choi, Soonja; Bowerman, Melissa Cognition, Vol. 41, Issue 1-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(91)90033-z	journal	December 1991
Review of Décsy (1988): A Select Catalog of Language Universals Comrie, Bernard Diachronica, Vol. 6, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.6.1.10com	journal	January 1989
Large Linguistic Areas and Language Sampling Dryer, Matthew S. Studies in Language, Vol. 13, Issue 2 https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.13.2.03dry	journal	January 1989
The Triples Distance for Rooted Bifurcating Phylogenetic Trees Critchlow, Douglas E.; Pearl, Dennis K.; Qian, Chunlin Systematic Biology, Vol. 45, Issue 3 https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/45.3.323	journal	September 1996
Lexical Universals Witkowski, S. R.; Brown, C. H. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 7, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.07.100178.002235	journal	October 1978
figurative language In a universalist perspective Brown, Cecil H.; Witkowski, Stanley R. American Ethnologist, Vol. 8, Issue 3 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1981.8.3.02a00110	journal	August 1981
Elements of Information Theory Cover, Thomas M.; Thomas, Joy A. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/0471200611	book	January 1991
Modern Applied Statistics with S Venables, W. N.; Ripley, B. D. Statistics and Computing https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-21706-2	book	August 2002
The electrical resistance of a graph captures its commute and cover times Chandra, Ashok K.; Raghavan, Prabhakar; Ruzzo, Walter L. Computational Complexity, Vol. 6, Issue 4 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01270385	journal	December 1996
Comparing the shapes of trees Dobson, Annette J. Combinatorial Mathematics III https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0069548	book	January 1975
Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns Choi, Soonja; Bowerman, Melissa Cognition, Vol. 41, Issue 1-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(91)90033-Z	journal	December 1991
Comparison of phylogenetic trees Robinson, D. F.; Foulds, L. R. Mathematical Biosciences, Vol. 53, Issue 1-2 https://doi.org/10.1016/0025-5564(81)90043-2	journal	February 1981
The cross-linguistic categorization of everyday events: A study of cutting and breaking Majid, Asifa; Boster, James S.; Bowerman, Melissa Cognition, Vol. 109, Issue 2 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.08.009	journal	November 2008
Space in Language and Cognition Levinson, Stephen C. Cambridge University Press https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613609	journal	January 2009
Language Typology and Syntactic Description Shopen, Timothy Cambridge University Press https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511619427	book	October 2007
Grammatical Categories and Cognition Lucy, John A. Cambridge University Press https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511620713	journal	January 2010
Typology and Universals Croft, William Cambridge University Press https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511840579	book	January 2002
The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science Evans, Nicholas; Levinson, Stephen C. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 32, Issue 5 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999094X	journal	October 2009
The weirdest people in the world? Henrich, Joseph; Heine, Steven J.; Norenzayan, Ara Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 33, Issue 2-3 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X	journal	June 2010
Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals Dunn, Michael; Greenhill, Simon J.; Levinson, Stephen C. Nature, Vol. 473, Issue 7345 https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09923	journal	April 2011
A Method of Language Sampling Rijkhoff, Jan; Bakker, Dik; Hengeveld, Kees Studies in Language, Vol. 17, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.17.1.07rij	journal	January 1993
The Logical Analysis of Kinship Greenberg, Joseph H. Philosophy of Science, Vol. 16, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1086/287012	journal	January 1949
Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family Bouckaert, R.; Lemey, P.; Dunn, M. Science, Vol. 337, Issue 6097 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1219669	journal	August 2012
On Information and Sufficiency Kullback, S.; Leibler, R. A. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, Vol. 22, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1214/aoms/1177729694	journal	March 1951
Principles of Historical Linguistics Hock, Hans Henrich Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110871975	book	December 1986
New directions in lexical typology Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria Linguistics, Vol. 50, Issue 3 https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2012-0013	journal	January 2012
The verbs of perception: a typological study Viberg, ÅKe Linguistics, Vol. 21, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1983.21.1.123	journal	January 1983
Language sampling Rijkhoff, Jan; Bakker, Dik Linguistic Typology, Vol. 2, Issue 3 https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.1998.2.3.263	journal	January 1998
general principles of human anatomical partonomy and speculations on the growth of partonomic nomenclature ¹ Brown, Cecil H. American Ethnologist, Vol. 3, Issue 3 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1976.3.3.02a00020	journal	August 1976
The ade4 Package: Implementing the Duality Diagram for Ecologists Dray, Stéphane; Dufour, Anne-Béatrice Journal of Statistical Software, Vol. 22, Issue 4 https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v022.i04	journal	January 2007

Cited By (15)

Knowledge gaps in the early growth of semantic feature networks Sizemore, Ann E.; Karuza, Elisabeth A.; Giusti, Chad Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 2, Issue 9 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0422-4	journal	September 2018
Languages Support Efficient Communication about the Environment: Words for Snow Revisited. Regier, Terry; Carstensen, Alexandra; Kemp, Charles Carnegie Mellon University https://doi.org/10.1184/r1/6616913.v1	text	January 2016
Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care? Pagel, Mark BMC Biology, Vol. 15, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-017-0405-3	journal	July 2017
How Does Grammatical Gender Affect Noun Representations in Gender-Marking Languages? Gonen, Hila; Kementchedjhieva, Yova; Goldberg, Yoav Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/k19-1043	conference	January 2019
Semantic typology: meaning in a cross–linguistic perspective Katunar, Daniela Suvremena lingvistika, Vol. 43, Issue 83 https://doi.org/10.22210/suvlin.2017.083.04	journal	July 2017
Knowledge gaps in the early growth of semantic networks Sizemore, Ann E.; Karuza, Elisabeth A.; Giusti, Chad arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1709.00133	preprint	January 2017
Building the Mongolian WordNet Batsuren, Khuyagbaatar; Ganbold, Amarsanaa; Chagnaa, Altangerel Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3685574	text	January 2020
EEG-based classification of natural sounds reveals specialized responses to speech and music Zuk, Nathaniel J.; Teoh, Emily S.; Lalor, Edmund C. NeuroImage, Vol. 210 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116558	journal	April 2020
Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics Forkel, Robert; List, Johann-Mattis; Greenhill, Simon J. Scientific Data, Vol. 5, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2018.205	journal	October 2018
Lexical semantics in language shift: Comparing emotion lexica in Dalabon and Barunga Kriol (northern Australia) Ponsonnet, Maïa Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Vol. 33, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00003.pon	journal	May 2018
The semantic map model: State of the art and future avenues for linguistic research Georgakopoulos, Thanasis; Polis, Stéphane Language and Linguistics Compass, Vol. 12, Issue 2 https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12270	journal	February 2018
Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure Jackson, Joshua Conrad; Watts, Joseph; Henry, Teague R. Science, Vol. 366, Issue 6472 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw8160	journal	December 2019
Languages Support Efficient Communication about the Environment: Words for Snow Revisited Regier, Terry; Carstensen, Alexandra; Kemp, Charles PLOS ONE, Vol. 11, Issue 4 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0151138	journal	April 2016
Towards a Universal Semantic Dictionary Castro-Bleda, María José; Iklodi, Eszter; Recski, Gabor https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201907.0336.v1	preprint	July 2019
Towards a Universal Semantic Dictionary Castro-Bleda, Maria Jose; Iklódi, Eszter; Recski, Gábor Applied Sciences, Vol. 9, Issue 19 https://doi.org/10.3390/app9194060	journal	September 2019

Similar Records

SLC primer for Russian translation users. [For IBM 360/195]

Technical Report · Mon Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 1977 · OSTI ID:7299874

Computerized language translation at ORNL. [Uses SLC language]

Conference · Wed Dec 31 23:00:00 EST 1975 · OSTI ID:7140781

Related Subjects

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION
conceptual structure
human cognition
network comparison
polysemy
semantic universals

On the universal structure of human lexical semantics

Citation Formats

References (30)

Cited By (15)

Similar Records

Related Subjects