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  • From polysemy to semantic change: Towards a typology of lexical semantic associations
  • John Newman
From polysemy to semantic change: Towards a typology of lexical semantic associations. Ed. by Martine Vanhove. (Studies in language companion series 106.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008. Pp. xiii, 404. ISBN 9789027205735. $165 (Hb).

This volume is introduced in the foreword (vii) as the product of a project begun in 2002 at the Fédération de Recherche Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. It consists of three parts: 'State of the art' (one chapter), 'Theoretical and methodological issues' (seven chapters), and 'Case studies' (six chapters). I focus here mainly on the first two parts where the more substantive theoretical issues are raised, without intending to diminish the value of the case studies.

In her chapter 'Approaching lexical typology', MARIA KOPTJEVSKAJA-TAMM provides a wide-ranging overview of the areas of research that constitute the field of lexical typology. She makes it clear that the types of words that are of primary interest in this connection are 'words as carriers of lexical meanings' (8), where lexical is presumably to be contrasted with grammatical (though grammaticalizations are mentioned later). Issues discussed include polysemy, denotation vs. descriptive meaning, and how words carve up some semantic space (e.g. body parts). One section is given over to the question of what meanings can or cannot be expressed by a single word in languages, for example, how many different lexemes a language uses to encode the meanings corresponding to hand, arm, foot, leg, finger, and toe (three in Russian, four in Japanese, a different combination of four in Rumanian, and five in Italian). A separate section deals with the related but different issue of what meanings can be expressed by one and the same lexeme, within one and the same synchronic word family, or by words historically linked. Here, too, body-part terms are discussed, but now with respect to questions that are concerned with identifying and motivating semantic shifts and grammaticalizations associated with examples such as ts'i 'mouth' giving rise to tsi'i 'in front of' (!Kung), body-part terms developing into reflexive-reciprocal-middle markers, and the polysemy of Samoan lima 'hand, five'. It seems very useful to include both kinds of paths within one overarching approach, as Koptjevskaja-Tamm does. Studying how a word such as Russian ryka denotes a certain part of the body is thereby integrated with the study of how a word meaning 'hand' (in another language) might change its meaning to 'arm' or might undergo some further derivational process to form a word meaning 'arm'. Having to decide between monosemy and polysemy approaches in describing the meaning of ryka becomes less important than identifying and motivating the commonalities between semantic change and the way in which words partition a domain. Koptjevskaja-Tamm also devotes a section to lexicon-grammar interaction involving a great variety of phenomena, for example, body-part terms as used in possessive constructions, kin terms in grammar, suppletion in verb paradigms, and membership of word classes. As she notes, some phenomena typically viewed as 'syntactic' might just as well be thought of as 'lexical' where the phenomena are lexically conditioned, and in that case a lexicon-grammar interaction is all-pervasive. Altogether, Koptjevskaja-Tamm's chapter helpfully draws together a vast amount of relevant research and weaves several different threads of scholarship into a coherent and original whole.

Part 2 begins with STÉPHANE ROBERT's 'Words and their meanings: Principles of variation and stabilization'. Semantic variation of form is viewed as a fundamental characteristic of languages (reflected, for example, in the pervasiveness of polysemy of isolated words) but one that is nevertheless regulated. For example, different metaphorical and metonymic kinds of extensions do not lead to random variation but result in a certain kind of stability whereby the extensions are governed by familiar mechanisms, for example, common schematic meanings and prototypes. Robert pays particular attention to processes at work at the utterance level, such as profiling of different active zones (he cleaned the window evokes a different active zone of window than he opened the window...

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