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 crosslinguistic 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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1766-1771 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| Volume | 113 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 16 2016 |
Funding
We thank Ilia Peiros, George Starostin, Petter Holme, and Laura Fortunato for helpful comments. H.Y. acknowledges support from Complex Agent Based Dynamic Networks (CABDyN) Complexity Center and the support of research grants from the National Science Foundation (Grant SMA-1312294). W.C. and L.S. acknowledge support from the University of New Mexico Resource Allocation Committee. T.B., J.F.W., E.S., C.M., and H.Y. acknowledge the Santa Fe Institute and the Evolution of Human Languages program. The project and C.M. are also supported, in part, by the John Templeton Foundation.
Keywords
- Conceptual structure
- Human cognition
- Network comparison
- Polysemy
- Semantic universals
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General