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Coexpression and synexpression patterns across languages: Comparative concepts and possible explanations

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Haspelmath,  Martin       
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Haspelmath, M. (2023). Coexpression and synexpression patterns across languages: Comparative concepts and possible explanations. Frontiers in Psychology, 14: 1236853. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1236853.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000D-D30B-9
Abstract
Meanings and linguistic shapes (or forms) do not always map onto each other in a unique way, and linguists have used all kinds of different terms for such situations: Ambiguity, polysemy, syncretism, lexicalization, semantic maps; portmanteau, cumulative exponence, feature bundling, underspecification, and so on. In the domain of lexical comparison, the term colexification has become generally established in recent years, and in the present paper, I extend this word-formation pattern in a regular way (cogrammification, coexpression; syllexification, syngrammification, synexpression). These novel terms allow us to chart the range of relevant phenomena in a systematic way across the grammar-lexicon continuum, and to ask whether highly general explanations of coexpression and synexpression patterns are possible. While there is no new proposal for explaining coexpression here, I will suggest that frequency of occurrence plays a crucial role in explaining synexpression patterns. Copyright © 2023 Haspelmath.