Author: Annika Tjuka
As part of our ongoing endeavour to expand the possible mappings in Concepticon, I introduce an extended concept list of Vietnamese based on the Intercontinental Dictionary Series (IDS). The list includes elicitation glosses for 1,310 concepts that can be used as a reference to add more data or for comparative…
How to Visualize Colexification Networks in Cytoscape (How to Do X in Linguistics 14)
The ability to visualize data in an intelligible way is an important skill for scientists. In linguistics, especially in lexical semantics, data are often visualized using graphs, i.e., networks. For example, in the web app for the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS), we use networks to illustrate that a lexical…
How to Organize Literature and Notes in Zotero (How to do X in Linguistics 13)
Reading, summarizing, and citing literature is an essential part of every student and researcher’s life. While there are many books and workshops on academic writing, there is less information on how to efficiently organize literature. For this reason, I offer an overview of how to organize literature and notes in…
Cross-Linguistic Colexifications with Body Concepts: Metaphor, Metonymy, Analogy
Colexification describes the relation between two meanings that are expressed with the same form in a given language. A colexification is established based on a linguistic analysis of word meanings in the same language. While the term is a cover term for different semantic relations (i.e., vagueness, polysemy, homophony), the…
The Origins of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications
In recent years, studies exploring the phenomenon of colexification across languages have steadily increased in number. Colexification occurs if a word has multiple meanings, regardless of whether the meanings are related (dish ‘plate; meal’) or unrelated (bank ‘financial institution; part of a river’). The investigation of cross-linguistic colexifications yields many…
Comparing NoRaRe data sets: Calculation of correlations and creation of plots in R
In a recent blog post, I introduced the Database of Cross-Linguistic Norms, Ratings, and Relations for Words and Concepts (NoRaRe) and demonstrated how to add new data sets (Tjuka 2021). The database currently includes 65 unique word and concept properties based on 98 different data sets across 40 languages (NoRaRe…
A list of color, emotion, and human body part concepts
Color, emotion, and human body parts are often considered universal semantic domains. However, cross-linguistic comparison of the connections within each of the domains reveals interesting differences across languages (e.g., Jackson et al. 2019). Researchers in lexical typology systematically collect the names for colors, emotions, and human body parts across various…
Adding data sets to NoRaRe: A guide for beginners
There has been much discussion about the reproducibility of research and how it can be improved (Munafò et al. 2017). One antidote to the “reproducibility crisis” seems obvious: data sharing. However, one additional point that is not mentioned as often is the standardization of shared data to make them comparable.…