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The view that words are arbitrary is a foundational assumption about language, used to set human languages apart from nonhuman communication. We present here a study of the alignment between the semantic and phonological structure (systematicity) of American Sign Language (ASL), and for comparison, two spoken languages—English and Spanish. Across all three languages, words that are semantically related are more likely to be phonologically related, highlighting systematic alignment between word form and word meaning. Critically, there is a significant effect of iconicity (a perceived physical resemblance between word form and word meaning) on this alignment: words are most likely to be phonologically related when they are semantically related and iconic. This phenomenon is particularly widespread in ASL: half of the signs in the ASL lexicon areiconicallyrelated to other signs, i.e., there is a nonarbitrary relationship between form and meaning that is shared across signs. Taken together, the results reveal that iconicity can act as a driving force behind the alignment between the semantic and phonological structure of spoken and signed languages, but languages may differ in the extent that iconicity structures the lexicon. Theories of language must account for iconicity as a possible organizing principle of the lexicon.
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Quantifying Semantic Similarity Across Languages
Do all languages convey semantic knowledge in the same way? If language simply mirrors the structure of the world, the answer should be a qualified “yes”. If, however, languages impose structure as much as reflecting it, then even ostensibly the “same” word in different languages may mean quite different things. We provide a first pass at a large-scale quantification of cross-linguistic semantic alignment of approximately 1000 meanings in 55 languages. We find that the translation equivalents in some domains (e.g., Time, Quantity, and Kinship) exhibit high alignment across languages while the structure of other domains (e.g., Politics, Food, Emotions, and Animals) exhibits substantial crosslinguistic variability. Our measure of semantic alignment correlates with known phylogenetic distances between languages: more phylogenetically distant languages have less semantic alignment. We also find semantic alignment to correlate with cultural distances between societies speaking the languages, suggesting a rich co-adaptation of language and culture even in domains of experience that appear most constrained by the natural world.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734260
- PAR ID:
- 10074361
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2551–2556
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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