Speakers
Description
In order to correctly use a word in a foreign language it is not enough to know “its meaning” (i.e., its translational counterpart in the native language). It is also necessary to identify the appropriate contexts of the word’s use which often differ from those of its counterparts in other languages. Bilingual dictionaries cannot represent all the contextual properties that distinguish entry words from their equivalents, best of them just provide several examples for each translation option. These examples, however, are not always indicative of which option is to be chosen in every particular context. The task of differentiation between translation options can be systematically approached from a typological perspective. As shown for various semantic domains (e.g., Lander et al., 2012; Rakhilina et al., 2022; Ryzhova et al., 2024), a cross-linguistic comparison of contexts featuring semantically similar words in several languages reveals recurrent patterns of lexical oppositions. These patterns can then serve as a basis for contrastive lexicographic descriptions and ultimately contribute to the construction of bilingual dictionaries of an active type (cf. Apresjan, 2012). In this paper, the principles of such a typological approach are illustrated with a study of adjectives pertaining to density and thickness of physical objects. The study is based on a sample of 25 languages that represent 8 families (IndoEuropean, Uralic, Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian, Kartvelian, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, Japonic). The data were obtained from corpora and interviews with native speakers of languages under investigation. In accordance with the technique developed within the frame-based approach to lexical typology (for an overview of various approaches, see KoptjevskajaTamm et al., 2015), differences between languages are described in terms of frames, i.e., typical situations which are relevant to a given semantic domain. The notion of frame in lexical typology inherits the key properties of the Fillmorean frame (Fillmore, 1978), but includes also taxonomic and some other restrictions on the slots filled by the arguments (for details, see Rakhilina & Reznikova, 2016). In case of qualitative terms, frames are largely determined by the type of objects these terms describe, namely, by their taxonomic, mereological and topological properties (Rakhilina & Reznikova, 2022, cf. also Talmy, 1983; Rakhilina, 2000; Kozlov & Privisentseva, 2022 on linguistic effects of the naïve geometrical classification of physical objects). The following frames were identified as underlying lexical oppositions in the THICK/DENSE domain: 1. 2. 3. 4. Dense sets (whose parts are close to each other, cf. ‘dense forest/crowd’) Thick substances (which are difficult to see through or not flowing easily, cf. ‘thick smoke/soup’) Thick layers (i.e., thick flat objects, cf. ‘thick blanket/book’) Thick pivots (i.e., thick elongated objects, cf. ‘thick tree/finger’) Based on these frames, we can build a typology of systems encountered in our sample. In the simplest systems, the frames 1–4 are distributed between two terms. Such binary systems are attested in three versions: • Frame 1 is opposed to the rest of the domain, cf. German dichter Wald ‘dense forest’ vs. dicke Suppe ‘thick soup’, dickes Buch ‘thick book’, dicker Baum ‘thick tree’; • Frame 4 is opposed to the rest of the domain, cf. Kabardian (Besleney dialect) ʁʷəm ‘thick’ (e.g., about a rope) vs. ʔʷəv (about forest, porridge or a layer of snow on a windowsill); • Frames are evenly distributed between two terms: frame 1 is colexified with frame 2, and both of them are opposed to frames 3-4, cf. Russian gustoj les ‘dense forest’, gustoj dym ‘thick smoke’ vs. tolstyj pled/ karandaš ‘thick blanket /pencil’. Ternary systems in our sample colexify either thick layers and pivots and use specific terms for sets and substances, as is the case in Armenian, or jointly express the thickness of substances and layers and have separate terms for sets and pivots, as in French and Georgian. Finally, our sample also features fully distributive systems that have dedicated terms for each of our frames, e.g., such systems are attested in Chinese and Japanese. Thus, frame approach can serve as an effective tool for detecting the degree of semantic overlap between translation equivalents and for representing polysemy in both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries in a structured and comparable way.
