Patterns of persistence and diffusibility in the European lexicon

Abstract This article investigates to what extent the semantics and the phonological forms of lexical items are genealogically inherited or acquired through language contact. We focus on patterns of colexification (the encoding of two concepts with the same word) as an aspect of lexical-semantic organization. We test two pairs of hypotheses. The first pair concerns the genealogical stability (persistence) and susceptibility to contact-induced change (diffusibility) of colexification patterns and phonological matter in the 40 most genealogically stable elements of the 100-items Swadesh list, which we call “nuclear vocabulary”. We hypothesize that colexification patterns are (a) less persistent, and (b) more diffusible, than the phonological form of nuclear vocabulary. The second pair of hypotheses concerns degrees of diffusibility in two different sections of the lexicon – “core vocabulary” (all 100 elements of the Swadesh list) and its complement (“non-core/peripheral vocabulary”). We hypothesize that the colexification patterns associated with core vocabulary are (a) more persistent, and (b) less diffusible, than colexification patterns associated with peripheral vocabulary. The four hypotheses are tested using the lexical-semantic data from the CLICS database and independently determined phonological dissimilarity measures. The hypothesis that colexification patterns are less persistent than the phonological matter of nuclear vocabulary receives clear support. The hypothesis that colexification patterns are more diffusible than phonological matter receives some support, but a significant difference can only be observed for unrelated languages. The hypothesis that colexification patterns involving core vocabulary are more genealogically stable than colexification patterns at the periphery of the lexicon cannot be confirmed, but the data seem to indicate a higher degree of diffusibility for colexification patterns at the periphery of the lexicon. While we regard the results of our study as valid, we emphasize the tentativeness of our conclusions and point out some limitations as well as desiderata for future research to enable a better understanding of the genealogical versus areal distribution of linguistic features.