title: On the universal structure of human lexical semantics.
abstract: 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. 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.
authors.affiliation: Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Oxford OX2 6ED, United Kingdom; Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6GG, United Kingdom; Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501; visang@santafe.edu tanmoy@lanl.gov.
authors.forename: Hyejin
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6190-4412
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Youn
authors.affiliation: American Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405;
authors.forename: Logan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Sutton
authors.affiliation: Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501; Earth-Life Sciences Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan;
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501;
authors.forename: Cristopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Moore
authors.affiliation: Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501; Ronin Institute, Montclair, NJ 07043;
authors.forename: Jon F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Wilkins
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131; Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720;
authors.forename: Ian
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Maddieson
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131;
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Croft
authors.affiliation: Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501; MS B285, Grp T-2, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545 visang@santafe.edu tanmoy@lanl.gov.
authors.forename: Tanmoy
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1060-652X
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bhattacharya
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D012660:Semantics
keywords: conceptual structure; human cognition; network comparison; polysemy; semantic universals
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