Week 7

• Lexical differentiation


  Over the generations, humans invented a very large store of labels for individuals and categories of things in the world (even categories of things not in the world)
• Reasons for lexical differentiation


  • Differences in environment, culture, and specific interest or experience
• Environment


  Tribes in different parts of the world with no contact with each other, each experiencing a different environment containing its own potentially unique set of animals and plants, climate and geology
• Environmental differences


  • Amharic has a word for hippopotamus, Inuktitut does not
• Culture


  Cultures of different tribes differ, resulting in differences in their store of words
• Cultural differences leading to lexical differentiation

  1. Certain naturally occurring things become more important

  2. Development of cultural artifacts

  3. Development of abstractions and concepts that do not represent physical things
• Specialization


  As culture progresses, experts emerge who invent words not known to everyone in the tribe
• Modern languages like Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, and Japanese have more words than Amharic, Tzeltal, Lingala, and Inuktitut
• There is no evidence that individual speakers of English or Japanese know any more words than individual speakers of Amharic or Tzeltal
• Ways new words are created in a language

  1. Semantic extension of an existing word

  2. Creating a new word out of combinations of old words or pieces of old words

  3. Borrowing the word from another language
• Personal pronouns


  Words that vary along the dimensions of person, number, gender, and formality
• English personal pronouns


  • I
  • me
  • you
  • she
  • her
  • he
  • him
  • it
  • we
  • us
  • you guys
  • they
  • them
• Person


  A semantic dimension with values of first, second, and third person
• Number


  A semantic dimension with values of singular, dual, trial, and plural
• English personal pronouns categorised by person and number


  • Singular: I, you, she, he, it
  • Plural: we, you, you guys, they
• Gender


  A semantic dimension with values of masculine, feminine, and neuter
• Formality


  A semantic dimension with values of formal and informal
• English personal pronouns categorised by person, number, gender, and formality


  • Singular: I, you formal, you informal, she, he, it
  • Plural: we, you formal, you informal, you guys, they
• Kinship terms


  Words used to refer to kinship relations
• Vertical separation from ego

  A semantic dimension representing the relationship to the person providing the reference point, with values of positive and negative numbers
• Horizontal distance from ego

  A semantic dimension representing the closeness of the relationship to the reference point, with numerical values
• Some English kinship terms and their values on the vertical, horizontal, and gender dimensions

  • mother (-1, 0, feminine)
  • daughter (+1, 0, feminine)
  • sister (0, 1, feminine)
  • aunt (-1, 1, feminine)
  • parent (-1, 0)
  • grandchild (+2, 0)
  • niece (+1, 1, feminine)
  • cousin (0, 2)
• Relative age


  A semantic dimension used in Lingala to distinguish older and younger siblings and aunts/uncles
• Parent path


  A semantic dimension used in Lingala to distinguish maternal and paternal aunts and uncles
• Some Lingala kinship terms and their values on the vertical, horizontal, gender, parent path, and relative age dimensions


  • mama (-1, 0, feminine, maternal)
  • tata (-1, 0, masculine, paternal)
  • nkoko (2 +/-, 0)
  • nkulutu (0, 1, older)
  • leki (0, 1, younger)
  • mama-nkulutu (-1, 1, maternal, older)
  • tata-leki (-1, 1, paternal, younger)
• Differences in kinship terms are more likely to be related to culture than differences in personal pronouns
• Children growing up in a particular culture are learning the cultural concepts and the words simultaneously